Kobo Vox Now Up for Pre-order – Ships on 28 October
Kobo have just outed their new Android tablet on twitter. (Surprisingly, Kobo leaked this on Twitter before they put out a press release.) It’s now up for pre-order on their website. I was the first to find that leaked listing a few weeks back, and now I bring you the Kobo Vox.
Update: Kobo have posted a video for the Vox. It’s at the end of the post.
Like we knew from the leaked listing, the Vox is a 7″ Android tablet. Screen resolution is 1024×600 (capacitive touchscreen), and it’s openly running Android v2.3 on an 800MHz CPU. It comes with 8GB Flash storage, SD card slot, speaker, and a headphone jack.
The Vox comes with Kobo’s reading app and Kobo Pulse, their new app for the socially obsessed. There’s no mention of an app store, but it is running Gingerbread and Kobo clearly state that you can install apps.
The Vox will of course come with the usual Android apps, (browser, email, media, etc). But Kobo are also shipping it with Facebook, Twitter, RDIO (a music app), Zinio, and PressReader. Clearly they don’t plan to copy Amazon and tie you into the Kobo ebookstore. They want to let you read content from wherever.
And of course the Vox will ship with the Kobo ebookstore, where you can buy from among 2 million plus ebooks.
The tablet is pretty much what I expected from the leaked listing, and as you can see Kobo are matching the price of the Kindle Fire. That’s smart, but also absolutely required. BTW, did you notice that Kobo also beat the ship date for the Kindle Fire and the (it’s coming eventually) Nook Color Acclaim? Good for them.
Oh, and I guess this means that the Acclaim is going to have to be pretty awesome to justify the $350 price tag that B&N were planning on. Heck, who am I kidding? The Acclaim is going to sell for less or it’s DOA.
Battery life for the Vox is 7 hours and it weighs around 400 grams. It’s listed for $199 on the Kobo website and you can get your choice of 4 colors. There’s no word yet on international availability; it looks like the Vox is only shipping to the US and Canada. (If you have a confirmed order elsewhere please let me know.)
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