Kobo’s first 10 inch tablet is a premium Android tablet with a rather affordable price tag. The new Kobo Arc 10HD features a 10 inch, 2560 x 1600 pixel display, a 1.8 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 4 quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. In other words, it’s a lot like the Toshiba Excite Pro.
But while Toshiba charges $500 for that tablet, the Kobo Arc 10HD will be available in October for $400 in the US and Canada. It does have less storage, with just 16GB of built-in space, but the Kobo Arc 10HD has a microSD card which you can use to add space for music, movies, books, or other content.
The Kobo Arc 10HD also has a micro HDMI port, a headset jack, stereo speakers, a 1.3MP front-facing camera, and up to 9.5 hours of battery life — when you’re reading a book or watching videos with the WiFi off. While tablet makers typically give you an estimate with WiFi on, Kobo is first and foremost an eBook company, so it makes sense for the company to consider how long you can use its Android tablets to read books without surfing the web.
The tablet features dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi with 2×2 MIMO, Bluetooth 4.0, and Miracast support for streaming content to a TV.
It measures 10″ x 6.8″ x 0.4″ and weighs 1.4 pounds.
Kobo’s 10 inch tablet is a Google Certified device that runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. That means it comes with the Google Play Store preloaded, and you can use it like any other Android tablet — although it does also come with the Kobo bookstore app preloaded, as well as Kobo’s social app, Reading Life, and a few other apps.
Kobo also preloads a number of Android apps including Facebook, Twitter, Skype, 7digital, Rdio, and OfficeSuite Viewer.
You can check out KT’s hands-on impressions of the tablet for more details.
If Kobo is able to offer this tablet at this price range… Now I am even more excited about what Google is going to offer with the next Nexus 10…
It should be interesting but the pricing isn’t abnormal… Toshiba just tends to charge a premium…
Asus for example, their upcoming Transformer update will also offer similar specs with Tegra 4 and the same starting price as this Kobo tablet… not counting the optional keyboard dock Asus will also offer…
While no Nexus device will offer a card reader, and there are cheaper alternatives to Tegra 4… So a even lower pricing is possible for the Nexus 10, eve if they match up on the other specs…
This looks like my next tablet – can’t wait for reviews when it’s launched. Hope it doesn’t disappoint!