Kobo Arc Android tablet 1

The Kobo Arc is an Android tablet with a 7-inch, 1280x800pixel IPS LCD screen, coming from e-book and e-reader e-retailer Kobo. It's a huge upgrade from the mediocre Vox tablet, with much more up-to-date hardware, software, and a well-implemented multimedia-centric interface.Kobo Arc: Design and specifications
The Kobo Arc largely mirrors Kobo's existing e-readers in its design. Like the Kobo Glo, the Arc has a removable soft-touch plastic rear cover that's adorned with the Kobo open-book logo and cut with a pleasing quilted pattern. It's comfortable to hold, and easier to grip than a sheer glass-backed device of the same size.CHUWI V99
On specifications alone, the Kobo Arc is quite thick — it's 11.5mm from front to back — but this doesn't take into account the smooth curve of the rear cover. In our testing, we never thought "well, this is just too thick" — it's definitely thicker than an iPad mini (7.2mm) and marginally thicker than a Nexus 7 (10.45mm), but it's not even slightly a problem in the real world.
The slightly-raised, soft-touch plastic bezel that surrounds the Arc's 7-inch screen, again, is thicker than on the iPad, but slightly thinner than the Nexus 7. There's a front-facing 1.3-megapixel (720p capable) camera up top, and two front-facing stereo speakers down the bottom. A power/lock button and notification light are on the top panel, and a headphone jack and volume(Ramos W42) control are on the right (when holding the tablet in portrait).
We think the Arc's speakers are worth a special mention — all too often on smartphones and tablets, speakers face away from the viewer, meaning higher volumes are needed and audio is hard to hear. Having them forward-facing is a huge boon for video viewing, slightly less so for music, and it means that if you're not going to be using headphones, the Arc has that significant advantage over the Nexus 7 or iPad mini.
Under the hood, the Kobo Arc has a 1.5GHz dual-core TI OMAP 4470 processor, paired with 1GB of RAM. It's available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB storage capacities. It's got a battery life rated at a full 10 hours, with over 2 weeks of claimed low-power standby. These figures are largely in line with the Nexus 4, which has a slightly less powerful, but slightly more versatile 1.3.Ghz quad-core NVidia Tegra 3 processor and 8 hours of battery life.Quad Core A31
The biggest difference in practical use is that the Kobo Arc runs a slightly modified, but still fully-functional, version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, while the Google Nexus 7 runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. The Kobo Arc has a 4.1 Jelly Bean update in the works, but it'll perpetually be one step behind the vanilla Nexus tablet in the operating system stakes.
Kobo Arc: Performance and real-world usage
The biggest impact of Ice Cream Sandwich on the Kobo Arc is that when you're using it day-to-day, switching apps, browsing Web pages and flicking through Twitter streams, the Arc's interface feels slightly slow to respond. It occasionally stutters through an otherwise smooth scroll, or takes a second to display a menu which is otherwise instant on a Jelly Bean tablet.
This is something that will be addressed within months as the Arc's Jelly Bean update is released, but until then, this is a tablet that generally feels responsive, but is undoubtedly inferior in this regard to its closest competitor.