Pandigital Novel review

It’s our guess that the Pandigital Novel has been turning a number of heads at retailers across america over the last few weeks. How could it not? It’s got an entire-color, 7-inch touchscreen, 2GB of on-board memory, runs a skinned version of Android and is priced around $180 (looking on where you’re shopping). Oh, and it’s got access to Barnes & Noble’s e-book store. About one-third the associated fee of the iPad, we sure can see the attraction, but after attempting to read a complete novel on it we are able to’t help but wonder how it found its well beyond product development and into the stock rooms of Walgreens, Bed, Bath & Beyond and JCPenny, to name a number of. Hit the break for our full review and to work out just exactly we’re talking about.

Feel and look

The Pandigital Novel joins the Augen GenTouch 78 and the Archos 7 Home Tablet at the sub-$200 tablet table, this means that it’s also made entirely of plastic. The black Novel (there’s also a white one available) doesn’t feel as cheap as Augen’s tablet or adore it’s going to wreck anytime soon, but we’re in no way stuffed with praise for the build quality. Actually, the Archos 7 feels noticeably better than Pandigital’s product. On a design note, we really do wish that the bezel wasn’t made from a glossy plastic — it is going to just match the remainder of the matte device.

We now have fewer complaints in regards to the size and weight of the .73-pound reader or tablet. As we’ve said many a times, the 7-inch screen size is good for holding the device in hand when reading a book while lying down and is unquestionably more manageable than the 9.7-inch, 1.5-pound iPad. Surrounding the .5-inch thick device is SD card slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a mini-USB port. There’s also a volume toggle, a WiFi on/off switch and a small black stylus that ejects from the bottom right edge. We do wish there were physical home and page forward / backward buttons, and you’ll understand why after reading a higher sections.

Screen and speakers

The unconventional, like the various other cheap Android tablets we’ve seen, has a 600 x 800-resolution, 7-inch resistive touchscreen. And yes, at this point hearing that a tablet has a resistive screen is on par with the sound of nails on a chalkboard. It really is nice that Pandigital throws in that stylus, but have you ever dreamed of reading a unique with a small stick in hand to turn pages? Didn’t think so. Still, it was helpful for surfing the net and making selections in smaller menus. Obviously, we found it more natural to take advantage of a finger when reading and, unsurprisingly, we had to press fairly hard to make selections or horizontally drag a finger across the screen to turn the page. Here’s actually where we found the touch experience to be extremely frustrating — repeatedly we couldn’t turn the page of a book by swiping a finger on the screen. To be honest, we’re unsure it’s the screen or the slow processor, but regardless there’s really nothing worse than being in the midst of a gripping novel and having to tug a finger across the page multiple times to get to the subsequent words. We don’t wish it on anyone, and the poor screen and the dearth of the physical page back and forward buttons truly stands inside the way of letting the device accomplish its main purpose.

We don’t have much praise for the matte screen either — it’s fairly washed out and the viewing angles aren’t all that good. We were ready to see the black and white text of Jennifer Weiner’s Best Friends Forever when reading at angle, but once we tried to watch images, slightly changing the attitude caused colors to seriously fade. Additionally, there’s an accelerometer, however it takes a fantastic two seconds to interchange the orientation. The star-shaped speaker on the back of the tablet is loud enough for personal listening and sharing with another, nonetheless it’s extremely tinny and we preferred to plug in some headphones.

E-reading and software experience

As its name indicates, the radical is de facto before everything an e-reader. And we do ought to say that the means of downloading books is really quite seamless. After logging into our B&N account over WiFi, the covers of our previously purchased books popped up within the My Library part of the home screen. The head of the home screen displays Barnes & Noble’s new releases and bestsellers and we had no problem selecting the lady with the Dragon Tattoo and downloading a sample. Once you do would like to look up a new book you’re taken to the Barnes & Noble website, but even from there we had no issues shopping.

So, yes, the technique of getting books onto the radical is very pain-free, but the technique of actually reading them isn’t pleasant. As we mentioned above, turning pages is very flaky. From time to time we had no issue dragging a finger across the screen to turn the page, but other times the page would just not turn. Additionally, generally once we tried to turn the page we mistakenly highlighted text and a menu to add a note or highlight popped up. Then there’s also the problem of identifying a way to come back to the home screen while in a book. It took us (and a number of other guinea pigs) near to a minute to work out it’s good to tap the end of the screen to drag up a menu with other reading controls. The Barnes & Noble software does support lending books with other Nook owners. Also, we must always note that we had no issues sideloading an ePub version of Little Women and opening it on the reader.

While we’ve heard that some had been ready to hack and root the Novel, it does come skinned with a rather simple UI that hides most of its Android 1.5 core. While the reading features are front and center on the home screen, the bottom pane contains shortcuts to applications like the net browser, music and video players. The browser is the average Android variety and is only fine for visiting sites — though we had to clear the cache to get it to load Engadget. The resistive screen does get within the way of scrolling a piece — we found ourselves selecting links by chance — but it surely’s tolerable. Unsurprisingly, there’s no access to the Android Market — there are preloaded Facebook, stocks and weather shortcuts, but they all just take you to websites.

Performance and battery life

The unconventional is powered by a 533Mhz Samsung ARM 11 processor and 128MB of memory, and to anyone that’s used a much better end smartphone or the iPad will find the experience to be slow. And we mean slow. We got used to having to wait about a two to a few seconds for an app to open or a book to load. And like we mentioned quite a number times now, it takes time to turn a page and may be extremely unresponsive. Have we mentioned how frustrating it truly is? a brief standard definition video clip played back without much of a problem, though it took a couple of minutes to fireside up. Still, the device requires more patience than we had at most times.

The battery life of the 7-inch device turned out to be better than Pandigital let on. When just using it in e-reader mode we got through a whole 6.5-hour flight from NY to La and still had about a 40 percent battery left. On our video rundown test that loops an identical standard definition video we got about 5.5 hours of battery life, that’s shorter than the Archos 7 but still better than we expected.

Wrap-up

As we stated at first, we actually can’t believe that Novel has made its way onto so many shelves across the country — just Googling the product name shows that it’s being sold at lots of popular retailers. The poor touchscreen, sluggish processor and often confusing interface cripple the device to the point where it will probably’t even manage its main task of turning pages and providing a cushty reading experience. There’s no beating around the bush on this one — those on the lookout for a lowcost e-reader will likely be better suited by the WiFi-equipped $149 Nook or $139 Kindle. As for those in search of a solid performing, cheap tablet that could manage e-books and surfing the net in full color, well, for that we all still wait…

Source

This post is tagged: novel, pandigital