The Kobo Vox is an Android-powered color eBook reader designed to access content from the Kobo online book store. It doesn’t get as much attention as the Amazon Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet because… well, because it’s not affiliated with Amazon or B&N.
It also has a slower processor and a less responsive touchscreen than either of those tablets.
But now it has one key feature that its competitors don’t: full access to the Google Play Store.
Kobo is now shipping the Vox tablet with the Play Store preloaded, offering users the ability to download and install hundreds of thousands of apps.
The Kindle Fire, on the other hand, uses the Amazon Appstore with around 40,000 apps, while Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Shop offers just a few thousand Android apps for the NOOK Tablet and NOOK Color.
You can install the Play Store on the Amazon and B&N tablets, but you have to root your Kindle Fire or NOOK Tablet and potentially void your warranty to do that.
Kobo’s tablet features a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel FFS+ display, an 800 MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and a microSD card slot for extra storage. It runs Google Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
The Kobo Vox is available from the Kobo store for $180.
via paidContent