Okay, I've been told by the Kobo team that there is no hardware button combo that get you into recovery mode. From my own understanding I also know that the Factory reset simply deletes personal data.
However, being able to take the entire internal memory out and play with it gives me hope that I can eventually write a program that'll back everything up and install alternative Android builds.
The picture below shows you how the 8GB card is partitioned on the Vox.
There is a block of 45 MiB of unallocated space at the start of the card. Unless they're doing something weird, this looks like it's actually just empty space or a bootloader.
Next, there's a 256 MiB ext3 partition which I believe is the boot partition and includes the core Linux install and all that fun stuff.
Next is a strange little 512 MiB ext3 partition that seems to contain just a backup of the recovery?
We then get an extended partition with two ext2 logical partitions inside. The first is the "data" partition, which is the main system storage partition (not to be confused with the internal "/mnt/sdcard" partition). Some personal data & internal apps go here. The second logical partition is some sort of cache or swap space.
Finally we get a 5.36 GiB fat32 partition. This is the /mnt/sdcard, the main user accessible storage. This is the only partition that becomes visible when connecting your Vox to your computer and contains nothing exciting.
Theoretically speaking, by installing something else in the first primary partition and the first logical partition (the boot partition and the data partition) we should be able to install a custom firmware.
Now the hard part is getting that all working.