They have gotten a pre-release view of the unit:
Kobo will be releasing their first tablet dubbed “Vox” this Friday at Chapters/Indigo locations and from their website in the USA. It will be priced at $199 and is competitively priced vs. the Kindle Fire. We just got back from Toronto, where we were at the Kobo HQ and got a full hands on review a few days before it officially comes out!
Hardware
The Kobo Vox features a 7 inch capacitive multi-touchscreen display with a resolution of 1025×600. The colors absolutely pop on this unit and the entire interface was customized for the screen size, and various orientations like Landscape/Portrait.
It has 8 GB of internal memory and you can expand it up to 32 GB via the MicroSD card. Most Kobo devices just have a simple drive that you insert your card into. It does not have a protective clasp made of rubber or anything else so dust does not get into it. Wish they would have done it because people frequently take their device out on holidays.
Things move fast with the 800 MHZ CPU processor and 512 MB of RAM. Scrolling through various menus was very snappy and apps seemed to load fairly quickly. I did notice graphics intensive books, such as graphic novels, comics and PDF files sometimes took awhile to load up. When they did load page turn speed was snappy.
I wonder how it will measure up to the Kindle Fire.