Deal of the week: ‘Kobo Vox’ tablet for $100

If you’re itching to treat yourself to a tablet this spring -- but don’t have $500 for an iPad or even $200 for a Kindle Fire HD – you can now pick up a 7-inch Kobo Vox tablet for $100.

Yes, this is last year’s model opposed to the newer Kobo Arc, but at half the cost there’s a lot of bang for the buck, here – plus you’ve got full access to the Google Play store and its more than 800,000 apps.

At its core, the Kobo Vox is a 7-inch color e-book reader, capable of wirelessly downloading and displaying books, magazines and newspapers. The FFS+ backlit LCD screen (1,024 x 600) is optimized for reading outdoors. You’ve got access to the Kobo Store, with nearly 3 million books, in total -- one-third of which are free classics. While reading, you can select from one of seven font styles and 42 available sizes.

A social media feature called Kobo Pulse lets you connect with other readers, such as seeing how many people are reading what you’re reading, what others think of the passage you just read, and so on.

And as with any Kobo, you can also borrow books digitally from your local library.

The Wi-Fi-enabled Vox also offered some touchscreen tablet-like functionality, allowing you to watch videos, play games, listen to music (and podcasts, audiobooks), browse the web and read email. By adding Google Play support, this Android 2.3 device is a lot more versatile. Kobo says some of the more popular downloads include Twitter and Facebook (social networks), Gmail (email), YouTube (videos), Zinio (magazine reader), Merriam Webster (dictionary) Scrabble (game), Rdio (streaming radio), Google Maps and Google Street View Maps.

From a hardware perspective, the Kobo Vox measures 7.57 inches tall by 5 inches wide by 0.53 inches deep, and weighs 14.2 ounces. It’s available in lime green, pink, ice blue and black. Integrated 8GB of memory translates to about 8,000 books – plus unlimited Kobo ebook cloud storage – plus there’s an expansion slot to add a microSD memory card up to 32GB.

It’s not the most powerful tablet available – it houses a 800 MHz processor with 512MB of system memory (RAM) – but that’s more than enough for an ebook reader and suffices for most tablet tasks. It’s no iPad, of course, but one-fifth the price. Battery tops 7 hours between charges.

More info on the Kobo Vox is here, while the link to buy it for $100 is here.