Kobo's recent eReader deal with WHSmith has resulted in the high-street retailer selling no fewer than three Kobo devices in stores. The £89 Kobo Wireless and £109.99 Kobo Touch (which I recently looked at alongside Amazon’s Kindle has now been joined by the Kobo Vox.

1. Kobo Vox Ereader

Retailing at £189.99, the Vox is far too expensive to survive in the market solely as an eReader. But the Vox is a lot more. It's an Android tablet with the Kobo eReading overlay and access to WHSmith's eBooks library. The Vox is not the first Android tablet to cater for eBooks. Any Android tablet can manage that thanks to a range of third-party apps, and Amazon has a Kindle app for it. But Kobo has put a little thought into its eReading services, and the result is, well, different.

What we have here is an Android tablet that's reasonably well made, but not stunning. It's a little thick and a little heavy (192.4mm by 128.4mm by 13.4mm and 402g). The build quality is acceptable but not exceptional. The diamond patterning on the rubbery-finished backplate is a nice touch, but it does attract greasy fingerprints. The 800MHz processor is classifiable as mid-range. Unfortunately, Kobo has not incorporated support for Flash. There's access to the Android Market, but not to all of it.

A subset is available which includes, says Kobo, more than 15,000 free apps. Notably absent from the preinstalled Android apps list is Google Maps, and it wasn't available for download either.

There's no GPS. There is no integrated mobile broadband, but you do get Wi-Fi. There's 8GB of internal storage, with just over 5GB actually accessible — a microSD card slot lets you add more storage capacity. The Kobo Vox runs Android 2.3, and preinstalled Android apps include a web browser, Facebook app, Gmail and other email support, calendar, contacts, gallery, music player, Twitter and YouTube client. Kobo adds Press Reader for access to newspapers and Zinio for magazines, in addition to its e-book reading facilities.

Kobo Vox Ereader

And there are apps you can download for phones and the desktop that will synchronise e-books to the last point read. There are also some social media tools for use with reading that expand slightly on what was in the Kobo Touch. Kobo Pulse drops an icon onto every reading screen, which you can sweep to get access to social facilities.

You can contact others who are reading the same book, and share your thoughts. You can also track reading stats — such as pages read, time spent reading — and earn badges for good performance. The WHSmith book store is well populated, including plenty of free, out-of-copyright texts.

Searching for and downloading books was not a problem. The 7in., 1,024-by-600-pixel screen can be difficult to read in bright sunshine; I also found it rather hard on the eyes indoors — even with the auto brightness turned off and the screen light way down. Prolonged spells of reading are generally less comfortable than with an e-Ink-based reader. The colour screen drains the battery quicker than e-Ink-based readers. The latter can deliver thousands of page turns and weeks of standby time, whereas the Kobo Vox's battery life is much shorter — as you'd expect from a standard tablet. Kobo says the battery should deliver seven hours of use with Wi-Fi turned off. You should probably always carry a charger.

Overall, I found the experience of using the Kobo Vox for e-book reading less tricky than I'd anticipated. Perhaps I'm just getting more used to mixing tablets and e-Ink devices for this task. The real irritations aren't with eBooks: they are with the slightly hamstrung version of Android that Kobo has used. Sandra Vogel Related Topics. By registering you become a member of the CBS Interactive family of sites and you have read and agree to the,.

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