[Psyke]

Have been playing with the Vox since last night almost non stop, but it's definitely a disappointment, even for a a relatively budget tablet.

As an E-reader, it does very well. It still has the same limitations in regards to LCD view-ability outside, but it really does try to compensate with with a very high brightness setting. I brought it outside and with the default auto brightness, I couldn't see a thing, even with overcast conditions where the sun was trying to force its way out. If I turn the brightness up all the way, the screen comes in very clear, but I think that if it the sun was full out, it would totally overpower the screen and it would become unusable. That said, now that I've had a good number of hours with it, I think the image quality is actually better than my Asus Transformer, which itself is very comparable to the Samsung Galaxy. The brightness on the Vox really does help the colors become more vibrant.

As a tablet however, there are a number of pretty serious problems:

- Swiping: it does not pick up swipes very well, and I don't know if it's because of the screen, because of the OS, or because of the processor used. You can't do quick swipes with it consistently. One of the games the 10 year old really wanted to play here because she plays it often on her dads Galaxy is Fruit Ninja, which is all about swiping. When trying to do fast swipes, it just doesn't want to register, or registers it as a very short swipe. I had noted the same thing while reading books; when tapping, there were no issues, but when trying to give it a quick swipe, it would fail. I would have to give it a long deliberate. This is also apparent on menu's too, where it will sometimes register swipes as a tap instead, opening apps when you didn't intend to.

- processor speed: I think they really did make a mistake with going with a single 800mhz processor when Kindle went with a dual 1ghz processor like most new tablets. While this doesn't affect e-reading all that much, apps do definitely run much slower. Load times for fruit ninja, and the angry birds apps, not to mention slowdown hickups while in them really do detract from the games. Movie watching, either local or on youtube don't really seem affected though, so this is good.

- Apps: They tout 15000 free apps via their kobo.getjar page. It's great that they included a lot of free apps, but not all of them are free. Some are limited time trials; this doesn't not constitute a free application. I've also hit on a number of applications that did not work on my vox, or ran slow to the point that they were unusable. when trying to get apps that show off your hardware, you would think they would have done a better job at filtering them.

Storage capacity: If you advertise 8GB of space, give us 8GB of space. If you need room for the OS and firmware and whatever, then put in extra to cover for it, but I'm really starting to get tired of this BS. This device also has an issue in that it partitions space into internal and internal SD. When you download apps, it goes to the internal memory, which is about 1GB. You can move said data from the internal memory to the internal SD, which is about 5.34GB, bit you need to figure out how to do that, which leads me to:

- Ease of use: I'm a geek...I readily admit it..I like taking computers apart and putting them back together again; I play with my windows registry and dabble in overclocking my equipment to try to tweak a little extra performance.. but trying to find things in this tablet has been very trying on my patience, so I really can only imagine how it may be for someone who isn't very technically inclined or hasn't played with Android before... the fact that they didn't include a file manager was also interesting..


on the plus side though, apart from the fact that the e-reader works as expected, the fact that it is an open system without having to root it is very nice. I've added the slide me market which is very nice (like the fact they show compatibility info for apps). Once I figured out how to access video's on an SD card, it ran them very well, although I had no sound for one of them (anyone know of a codec pack for android?). It was a huge 1080P video and there wasn't a hiccup at all. Don't know if Sound would change that though. but the picture was great.

battery life seems to be very good on it; after a full nights charge, I've been playing with it pretty heavily for the last 4 and half hours, using books, video and games, all with the wifi on, and battery is still showing 80%...If that's the case, I should be able to get well over 10hrs of battery life, more without the wifi.. Very nice indeed.


So far I think we'll keep it, but I'm going to spend the rest of the weekend evaluating it and trying to use it as the little one would and see how it goes. Will try to write up more on it later on.