Why do you want an e-book reader? It sounds like a trick question, but your answer is vital. If you said "to read books" look no further than traditional monochrome e-ink readers such as the Amazon Kindle. If you said "to read books and…" the Kobo Vox is aimed at you.
Designed to go head-to-head with Amazon's much-hyped Kindle Fire, the Kobo Vox is part of a new wave of e-book readers aimed at people who find reading isn't enough. Consequently these devices are hybrids that keep e-books and e-book purchasing at their core, but add aspects of tablet functionality such as app stores and multimedia playback while keeping the price low. On paper this sounds like the best of both worlds. The trouble is we're not dealing with paper anymore.
Design
This material difference becomes apparent before the Vox is switched on. At 192.2 x 129.5mm the Vox has a conveniently small footprint, but at 13.4mm deep it is almost twice as thick as both a standard Kindle (fourth generation) and the iPad 2. At 400g it is also more than twice the weight of the Kindle, two thirds the weight of an iPad 2 and actually heavier than Samsung's 345g Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus Android tablet.
In all fairness to Kobo, the Vox is essentially a stripped down tablet and it runs Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" so these figures shouldn't be surprising. What does surprise is how disappointing the Vox is in hand, with lacklustre build materials and poor-feeling construction. The exterior of the Vox is a mess of unflattering plastics. The facia is reflective piano black, the screen itself is plastic not glass and lacks an oil-resistant layer to ward off fingerprints. The sides switch to a matt black finish with a plastic power button and volume rocker -- both painted silver to look like metal -- while the rear changes again to a rubber textured diamond pattern. Superficially the pattern itself is pleasant on the eyes but much as the facia picks up every fingerprint, the rear shows off every bump, scuff or scratch which doesn't bode well for its long term durability.
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...........................................................................................................................................................Poor screen, poor performance
Unfortunately this is just the tip of the iceberg. Switch on the Vox and you'll quickly notice the 7-inch screen is second rate. Seven inches is quickly becoming the norm for this new breed of e-book reader as is its 1024 x 600 resolution, but Kobo has broken from the pack in choosing an FFS+ display instead of IPS. This gamble fails. Colours look washed out, but worse still text is notably pixelated making it unpleasant to read over longer periods. For years smartphones may have gotten away with substandard call quality in lieu of additional functionality, but we can't see how an e-book reader can similarly survive being so poor at its primary purpose.
The iceberg gets bigger still. In opting for so much plastic Kobo has committed a cardinal sin: not using a glass screen. The company insists the Vox uses a capacitive layer, but response times are as poor as an old resistive touchscreen and multiple touches are commonly required to get it to recognise commands. That said we can't lay all the blame squarely on the screen because the hardware is equally culpable.
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