Kobo is the latest eBook company to throw its hat into the Android tablet ring. The company has introduced the Kobo Vox, which is its answer to the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble NOOK Color.
The Kobo Vox features a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel multitouch display, 8GB of storage, and 512MB of RAM. It has an 800 MHz processor and a battery that should last for up to 7 hours. The tablet runs Google Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
On paper, there’s not much setting the tablet apart from Amazon or Barnes & Noble’s offerings. But the Vox comes in a variety of colors including hot pink, lime green, ice blue, and jet black.
Also, unlike the NOOK Color, you can install thousands of Android apps on the Vox without rooting it first. And unlike the Kindle Fire, the Vox has a SD card slot.
The company says the tablet will come with an app store with access to 15,000 apps. That implies that we’re not talking about the Android Market which has hundreds of thousands of apps. If I had to guess, I’d say we’re also not talking about the Amazon Appstore for Android… but there are plenty of other third party app stores for Android.
The Kobo Vox measures 7.6″ x 5.1″ x 0.5″ and weighs 14.2 ounces. It supports EPUB books, a range of audio and video formats including MP3, MP4, FLAC, OGG Vorbis, and WebM and comes preloaded with apps including Facebook, Twitter, Zinio, and PressReader.
Kobo doesn’t get as much attention as Barnes & Noble and Amazon — especially now that US partner Borders has gone out of business. But the company offers a decent selection of eBooks, a nice range of mobile apps for Android, iOS, and other platforms, and a collection of E Ink eBook devices. The Kobo Vox is the company’s first foray into Android tablet territory, and it certainly looks like a respectable entry — although I suspect it will primarily appeal to customers that are already using Kobo services.
The $200 Kobo Vox tablet is expected to ship October 28th.
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