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Placed against the low, low standard of last year's Vox, the Kobo Arc is a winner. Compared to the rest of the 7-inch tablets in the world, however, it's a non-starter.

The Kobo Arc is a great small-screen Android tablet, with strong performance, a crisp display, and, unlike some higher-profile competitors, access to the Google Play app store.

A fine tablet that simply doesn't offer enough compelling reasons to seriously consider it.

For us, the key selling point of the Kobo Arc is its Tapestries interface and seamless integration with Kobo’s extensive e-book and e-mag store, if you can ignore the Discover bar. It’s a perfectly capable (if sometimes slightly stuttery) Android tablet beyond its e-reading credentials.

However, apart from a few niggling features on the software front, and the lack of memory expansion and Bluetooth, we have to say that we'd consider the Kobo Arc worthy of attention. It's not restrictively tied to an ecosystem like Kindle or Nook, but perhaps lacks the purity of the Nexus.

There's a lot going for the Kobo Arc. It's well built and designed, even if it's not the prettiest tablet around. It's powerful enough for most too, although there are faster devices out there that give a more-polished performance. Importantly, though, it's priced reasonably.

Overall, if those 'missing' hardware options are irrelevant to you, we'd recommend the Kobo Arc as an impressive 'my first tablet'. However, overall the Kobo Arc is probably happiest being the e-reader-based tablet that offers by far the most freedom.

Without a doubt, it doesn't displace the Nexus 7 at the top of the tree, but it's a perfectly good tablet in its own right.

The Kobo Arc has great value for money and an attractive multimedia-oriented interface.

The Kobo Arc shows that, after the poor Vox tablet, Kobo does know how to do things other than make E-ink eReaders. With a keen price, decent innards and a respectable, if not great, screen, it’s a serious contender in the low-cost tablet space.

We’d have one over the Kindle Fire HD, simply because it provides more flexibility at the same price, and it’s cheaper for the 32GB version too. However, for all-round excellence, the Nexus 7 remains our pick of the 7in tablets.

Capable of hosting any other app or game from Google Play, the Arc impresses elsewhere with its unique Tapestries skin within an otherwise open Android experience. It definitely feels more like an Android tablet than the heavily customised Kindle Fire HD.

However, when you begin to use it properly, the Kobo Arc is a perfectly decent 7in tablet. A great screen, powerful processor, good speakers, budget price and full access to Google Play, make this a very attractive proposition.

The software isn’t quite as polished as the Nexus’s and it doesn’t have the latest version of Android, but the Arc still makes a very tempting alternative.