Kobo Vox: A social, multipurpose e-reader and tablet

PC World - The Kobo Vox is a value-priced tablet with a twist. Like its E-Ink sibling, the Kobo Touch e-reader, the Vox has a social focus, and places an emphasis on sharing reading experiences. At $200 (as of November 20, 2011), the Kobo Vox is priced the same as the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook Color, and $50 less than the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet. Though it lacks the video/music download and streaming options that distinguish its competitors, the Vox deserves notice for coupling e-reading capabilities with the multimedia functions of a basic Android tablet.

Of the three tablets, the Vox is the most like a true Android 2.3 Gingerbread tablet -- which is both good and bad. The good part: You get many of the stock Android apps that come with Gingerbread (email, calculator, contacts, calendar, clock, browser, gallery, YouTube), minus Google apps such as those for Gmail and the Android Market, since this is not a Google device. The bad part: Gingerbread is more designed for phones than it is for the 7-in. screen of a tablet.

Still, you get the benefit of having Android navigation conventions that you may already be used to on your smartphone, from the six-button menu pop-ups to the three familiar capacitive-touch Android buttons (back, menu and home) to shortcuts such as pressing and holding the menu button to call up your eight most recently accessed apps.

True to a typical Gingerbread tablet, the Vox produced a handful of errors and glitches when I tried to use some of the apps, including the preinstalled Scrabble Free. Kobo advertises full open access to Android, and I found that it worked as such, most of the time. I had issues with some app sources, but other apps installed just fine, including an .apk file that I found for the Amazon Appstore.

Kobo includes Rdio for music streaming, Zinio for accessing some 4500 digital magazines, and PressReader for accessing over 1900 newspapers; this arrangement keeps periodicals inconveniently separate from shopping at Kobo, as opposed to shopping at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary is also on board, but it doesn't integrate with the reading function (the company says this feature is coming in a software update).

Custom Reading Widgets

The Vox's customized Android interface puts a Kobo-centric spin on everything from notifications to the dock menu to the home-screen reading widget. What's pleasant about this approach is that the Vox doesn't feel like an arbitrary reskin of Android, in spite of the interface's different functionality and look. Rather, it feels as if Kobo simply extended the native Android OS to embrace the Kobo vision, in ways that are tailored for the tablet's reading activities.