We have to hand it to Kobo. It came out of nowhere just under two years ago, and has clawed itself to a significant place in the market – 36 per cent in its mother country, Canada (although less everywhere else) – by releasing comparatively affordable, user-friendly devices.
As a result, we’ve come to expect a certain standard from Kobo e-readers, and we’ll say right off the bat: the Vox falls quite short of that mark.
In keeping with its minimalist design principle, the Vox is very simple and sleek. The black-bezelled face is pretty pared down, with what have come to be pretty standard touch buttons for Android just below the screen for Back, Menu and Home.
It’s pretty heavy, coming in at just over 400g – more than twice the weight of the 185g Kobo eReader Touch – and, rather than glass, the 7-inch touchscreen is heavy-duty plastic, which gives the entire thing a cheap sort of feel compared to the glass-fronted devices we’re used to. Plastic looks cloudier and gets smudgier than glass, too, and we were dismayed on a closer look to realise that we could actually see the LEDs through the Android navigation buttons.
It’s a poor job, and lamentable that in Australia, we have to settle for an unfinished product.