Kindle Fire vs. the Kobo Vox vs. the Nook Tablet

However, they are smaller and not as fully featured as tablets just as the Apple iPad 2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Nevertheless they are not as expensive either; during both the iPad 2 and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 start at about $499, the Kindle Fire and Kobo Vox each cost $199, during the Nook Tablet runs a bit higher at $249.

True physical Home button like the Nook Tablet has

Although it lacks a true physical Home button like the Nook Tablet has, below the screen you'll find familiar Android buttons, along with printed icons, for going Back, bringing up menus and returning home. This makes it the only tablet of the three that shows much of its Android heritage -- those buttons are typically available on Android phones and tablets.

All three of the tablets use Android version 2.3 as the underlying operating system, nevertheless apart from the Kobo Vox, you wouldn't know that to look at them. They feature their own specific interfaces, for better and for worse, as we'll see in this section.

The Kobo Vox is the most Android-like of the three e-readers, featuring multiple customizable panes with five unmovable icons across the bottom providing navigation to a variety of locations and apps, and changeable rows of icons above that. The top part of the screen has a notification area, such as Android smartphones and tablets do. The Settings page, which you can get to from the main screen and which lets you customize how your tablet works, looks identical to the stock Android settings area. All this makes Vox's main interface instantly recognizable and usable to owners of Android devices.

The Kindle Fire noses out the Nook Tablet here

The Kindle Fire noses out the Nook Tablet here, by dint of its more consistent interface and navigation. If the Nook button worked inside all apps consistently, I would prefer the Nook Tablet because its interface is more customizable, with more navigation options. For now, even though, it's the Kindle Fire by a nose. As for the Vox, because it's little more than stock Android, it can't compete with the other two.

The Kindle Fire comes with a solid set of reading tools that offers very good controls for changing font type and size, line spacing, margins and what Kindle calls color mode -- three selections that let you change whether you want dark characters against a light background or light characters against a dark background, and the contrast level. Although you can choose among eight different font sizes, I found them usually too small. Nevertheless apart from that, the Kindle Fire offers more controls over the display of your books than does the Nook Tablet or Kobo Vox.

The speaker is monaural to put it more exactly than stereo, so if you've listening to music, you'll want to plug in a headphone or an external set of speakers to its headphone jack. However the problems with the speaker go beyond mono sound -- it's underpowered. The single speaker is at the bottom, on the back, and I found sometimes that the sound was so weak that I could barely hear it when watching a movie. To properly enjoy some movies, I found that I had to use a headphone or speaker. Strangely, I didn't experience the same problem when listening to music or read-aloud books.

The Kindle Fire's Silk browser is the only one of the bunch that uses tabs, which makes handling multiple sites easier than having them each in their own windows. For that reason alone, it's the best browser of the three.

The Vox's Web browser appears to be in substance the same one as shipped with Android. Like as not because of that, Web sites automatically display their mobile versions, or rather than their normal ones. There's good and bad with that: Good because the text displays larger and is easier to read; bad because you don't get the full experience of graphics, layout and multimedia components.

The Nook Tablet's Web browser is fast

The Nook Tablet's Web browser is fast and displays graphics and text crisply. However it falls short when it comes to handling multiple Web sites, because it doesn't use tabs. Instead, navigation is more of that sort of a smartphone, opening each new site in its own separate window, like the stock browser built into Android phones.

All three e-readers are Android tablets as then, so you'll want to take advantage of the operating system's ability to use a variety of apps.

The Amazon App store features the usual variety of apps, ranging from games to entertainment, productivity, lifestyle, utilities, social networking, and more. Amazon says it had 850 apps in its store at launch, slightly smaller than the Nook Tablet's number, nevertheless not dramatically so.

The Kindle Fire as they do on the Nook Tablet

Apps don't look or work as then on the Kindle Fire as they do on the Nook Tablet, even though. They tend to distend themselves to fit the 7-in. screen, as is common with Android tablets. Pandora does this, for instance. It may be that Amazon hasn't worked with app developers to get them to write apps exactly for its tablet. For instance, when you first launch Pandora, you get a warning that it may use a great deal of data -- the exact same warning you get when launching it on a smartphone, though such a warning is irrelevant to a W-iFi user in other words than someone who may be charged for bandwidth on a smartphone.

Apps worked and played then on the Nook Tablet, which isn't always the case with Android-based tablets. Though many of the apps were originally written for the smaller screens of Android smartphones, they didn't appear to be distended and stretched when run on the Nook Tablet, as is often the case with other Android tablets. Pandora, for instance, filled the screen perfectly, as if it were designed for a tablet, which I found not to be the case for other Android tablets just as the Xoom, or for the Kindle Fire or Kobo Vox, in this respect.

The e-reader with the best hardware

If you're looking for the e-reader with the best hardware and performance, the most expandability, the best screen and e-reading experience, you'll want the Nook Tablet. At $249, it costs $50 more than the Kindle Fire or Vox, so you'll pay a small premium compared to the other two. However that extra will be worth the cost for those who want to be able to read and consume as much content as possible locally when they're out of range of a Wi-Fi network.