Kobo Vox review

That’s all the good news, but the bad news completely overshadows everything else. For starters, there’s a lowly 800MHz Cortex A8 processor, which seems to struggle with the operating system. Every action is painfully slow, with books jerking into view as the tablet tries to deal with them. It doesn’t help that the touchscreen is very unresponsive. Pinching-to-zoom can be a bit hit and miss, while we had to stab our fingers at the screen to make the Vox respond.

There are other problems, too, including the fact that the Kobo App doesn’t let you select links embedded in books, such as in the contents pages. It lets you bring up a separate contents menu, where you can jump to separate pages, but links in actual pages still didn’t work for us.

Buying books from Kobo is through the separate Shop Kobo app, which works well enough if you know the name of the book you want to buy, but browsing’s not particularly good. There aren’t many categories and granulation is poor, so it’s tricky to find books on subjects that you’re interested in. Kobo doesn’t have a magazine section, but the Zinio app is preloaded for this. There’s plenty of choice on this service, including Computer Shopper.

The limitations continue to pile up when you try and use the Vox as a regular Android tablet. There’s no Android Market for one, just the GetJar store, which doesn’t have that much content on it. You can load apps directly if you can get the relevant APK on a Micro SD card, but that’s quite a lot of hassle for most people.

Wi-Fi is built-in as you’d expect, but there’s no mobile and no Bluetooth. There’s no camera either, although given that most cheap tablets have terrible cameras this probably isn’t such a loss.

The Vox has limited hardware and doesn’t even have a camera.

It’s good to see that battery life was respectable. Running at half-brightness looping a video we managed 5h 20m – this is close to the 7h quoted time that Kobo gives. For book reading you’re likely to get longer than our tested time.

Kobo has certainly got the pricing of the Vox right and the benefits of a colour screen are certainly attractive. Sadly, the implementation really lets it down, particularly the sluggish performance. We’d rather buy a Kobo eReader Touch and stick with black-and-white content for this price, or save up and buy a fully-fledged Android tablet, such as the excellent Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime.