Comparing e-reader tablets: Kobo Vox vs. Nook Tablet

The challenge

We have two Amazon Kindle Fire competitors for a comparison here. Barnes & Noble and Kobo Inc. have apparently devised the idea of 7-inch tablets in reply to Amazon’s Kindle Fire project. Soon after the announcement of Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble and Kobo went on to announce their versions of e-reader tablets respectively Nook Tablet and Kobo Vox. Like Kindle Fire, the tablets run on Google Android platform and the main purpose is e-reading and audio and video content consumption.

Kobo Vox vs. Nook Tablet

Kindle Fire, Kobo Vox and Nook Tablet are not full-fledged tablets, anyhow. It is better to call them e-reader tablets as they are predominantly meant for e-reading rather video chatting, image capturing and many other common tablet uses. You can also enjoy video and audio contents using the devices. They come with preloaded on-demand video service apps like Netflix, Hulu Plus and others. Anyway, here we make a profound comparison between the gadgets, which will help you find out the best product from Kobo Vox and Nook Tablet.

Comparison attributes

Software

Both Nook Tablet and Kobo Vox feature Android 2.3 Gingerbread. The tablets come with Android Market, thus you can access thousands of Android apps. Since the same version of Android run on the tablets, we can’t say which stands ahead of the other.

Winner: Draw

Screen Size

Nook Tablet sports a 7-inch IPS TFT active matrix high resolution (1024 x 600) display with a color depth 24-bit (16.7 million colors). The touchscreen display helps you turn up pages, surf web and navigate through videos and images quickly.

Meanwhile, Kobo Vox has a more advanced 7-inch Color AFFS+ TFT active matrix touchscreen display with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. Display of Kobo Vox performs slightly better than Nook’s thanks to the Color AFFS+ technology.

Winner: Kobo Vox

Storage

Nook Tablet features 16GB of built-in memory, plus a 32GB expandable microSD slot. It is when Kobo Vox has just 8GB integrated memory with the same 32GB expandable microSD slot. It makes simply clear that Nook Tablet has better memory options than Kobo Vox. You can store more books, movies, images and other contents on the tablet from Barnes & Noble.

Winner: Nook Tablet

Processing

Nook Tablet offers more advanced processor performance thanks to Texas Instrument’s 1GHz dual core OMAP 4 processor and 1GB of RAM. Kobo Vox is up with only an 800 MHz processor and 512MB of RAM.

Winner: Nook Tablet

Price

Price is certainly the most important thing. Amazon Kindle Fire grabbed media headlines with its attractive price tag of $199. But only Kobo could bring its tablet in the same price range. Kobo Vox has the same price of Kindle Fire.

But Barnes & Noble is to sell its Nook Tablet for a price of $249, $50 better than both Vox and Kindle Fire. It is surely a shortfall of Nook Tablet over its competitors even including the moderate Kobo Vox.

Winner: Kobo Vox

Winner

The ultimate winner of the comparison is Nook Tablet. The device has better tech specs, features and capabilities. But when it comes pricing, Nook Tablet will face some challenge from Kobo Vox. However, it is an important point that Nook Tablet has better processor performance, storage option, RAM capacity and others from Kobo Vox. So the price thing may be camouflaged with better specs.

The verdict

The new e-reader tablet market is becoming more frenzy with lots of products. After Kindle Fire, we now have a pick of e-reader tablets as Nook Tablet and Kobo Vox. Indeed. There are lots of customers, who want to buy e-reader tablets to expand their reading habits into new horizons with the multimedia slates.

Competition between Nook Tablet and Kobo Vox is bit intriguing. Customers have two tablets with significant difference in hardware qualities. But price tag reflects the difference in $50. So it is not sure whether customers will get ready to spend an extra of $50 for a better spec’ed Nook Tablet. Maybe, most customers may go for a $199 Kobo Vox as they don’t want enough sophisticated features on an e-reader tablet.