Pandigital Novel Review

Pandigital Novel eReader

Overview

Pandigital, known for their digital photo frames and scanners, has decided to jump into the ereader fray with their newest creation, the Pandigital Novel, a 7-inch multipurpose ereader with an LCD touchscreen, Wi-Fi, and an Android operating system.

Like the Apple iPad and Augen eReader, the Pandigital Novel is a combination between an ereader and a multimedia device, capable of browsing the web, playing music, sending email, and displaying videos and images on its 800 x 600 resolution screen.

The Novel is expected to sell for $160 - $260 from a laundry list of major retailers like Sears, Staples, K-Mart, BJ's, Kohl's and others, but selection is currently hit or miss at most retail stores. eBay is about the best option until the device becomes more widely available later in August. And Walgreens now has them online only for $149.

Update: Since this review was written, Pandigital has released new firmware updates for the Novel that improves the touchscreen responsiveness, fixes some bugs with Wi-Fi, adds screen rotation, Adobe DRM support, and other miscellaneous bug fixes. So keep that in mind as you read this review done with the previous firmware.

Also, the Pandigital Novel can be hacked to run some other Android apps (although its hardware is somewhat limited), including the B&N and Amazon Kindle ereading apps.

Features and Functions

First off, the touchscreen takes some getting used to. The sensitivity and accuracy is absolutely awful when using the meat (for lack of a better term) of your fingers. Once I started using a stylus I found the touchscreen works great, the quickness in which it responses still needs some improving but it works quite well, even tiny links are easy to activate when using the web browser. A long fingernail can get the job done too; it just requires a hard tap.

The screen technology is digital TFT LCD, and the quality is decent but not great. The light seems to glitter, especially white; it's not solid color. It looks better further away than close-up, or dimmed slightly.

The Pandigital Novel's claim to ereading fame is its integration with Barnes and Noble's store for ebooks, magazines, and newspapers.

It also comes with a built-in email application, web browser, alarm clock, calendar, games, and dictionary.

There's a 2-in-1 memory card slot for SD and MMC cards up to 32GB, and it comes with 1GB internal memory. There's an orientation sensor, mini USB port, stereo speakers, headphone jack, and a battery that lasts up to six hours in reading mode.

The Pandigital Novel as an eReader

Since the Pandigital Novel runs Android, I was hoping to install the Aldiko ebook reader app, but installing apps can't be done at this point.

The Novel's ebook reader offers some good features but lacks any customizing options, no way to set margins, change font type, or customize font or background color. Hyperlinks in ebooks don't work. The brightness can only be adjusted in the main settings menu and tends to reset sporadically.

There are some good features like adding notes, highlights, bookmarks, and accessing the dictionary. Since hyperlinks don't work in the book's TOC, there's one built-in to the bookmarks menu that works effectively. A night reading mode turns the background black and the text white, and there are 4 font sizes.

The Pandigital Novel supports just two ebook formats: EPUB and PDF, non DRM and B&N DRM. There doesn't seem to be any way to authorized Adobe DRM ebooks, however. So no library ebooks or DRM ebooks from anywhere but B&N.

On the positive side, it can download free EBUB and PDF ebooks directly from free ebook websites like Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks. If you have a memory card installed you have to select import SD card to get them to show up in the library, as it automatically saves to the card if installed.

I downloaded all of Mary Robinette Kowal's short stories from Feedbooks and read them on the Pandigital Novel. At first I didn't care for the screen, but then I turned the brightness down to about 1/3 and enjoyed reading on it well enough (the good stories helped). E Ink is still the way to go for hardcore reading though.

PDF functionality is basic. Color for comics and other visual PDFs is nice, but there's no zoom and text size options can be odd and unpredictable.

Overall, reading is what you'd expect with an LCD screen. Works good indoors but not so good outdoors. Being able to dim the brightness helps with the glittery quality of the screen, however some options for changing the background to a more subdued color would be nice for reading.

Pandigital Novel Video Review

B&N's eBooks Store

For B&N's ebooks it shows book covers, but not for side-loaded content. I tried one of B&N's digital newspapers that I had from reviewing the Nook. It worked, but since hyperlinks don't activate browsing through it is pretty much impossible. Surely Pandigital will update to include hyperlink support.

Pandigital Novel Home

The actual shopping from B&N's ebook store doesn't seem to be very well thought out. There's a widget at the top of the homescreen that shows a list of the bestsellers, new releases, newspapers and magazines. It lists the top 50 or so, 5 at a time, and there's no way to run searches from here.

Clicking the shop icon opens the browser and takes you to B&N's main site. The problem is that it is not optimized for a mobile browser or a 7-inch screen and takes long to load and requires patience to run searches and constantly scroll through pages.

Once you buy an ebook it doesn't automatically go to your library. You have go in to the "library app" of the Novel and then sign in again to B&N and select the ebook from the list and then download it from there. Most of my existing B&N ebooks won't download. Probably because they are PDB format and the Novel doesn't support that format. This could be a problem.

Web Browser

Wi-Fi is easy to set up. It scans for networks and then you need to enter the password the first time. Sometimes internet automatically connects when you tap the browser and other times it has to go through the whole process of scanning and connecting again, so there's a bug somewhere.

Pandigital Novel Browser

The browser has a menu that brings up bookmarks, there's a forward and back button, refresh, search, and a settings menu. There are settings options for layout, text size, landscape mode, Javascript, cookies, privacy settings, and others.

The browser can open in multiple windows but there are no tabs. There's also a recent history list given for each site visited by tapping the url.

The browser works fairly well. It's main drawback is that it loads slow and scrolling is jerky. Zooming in and out is a little tricky too, but works good after some getting used to it. Its default setting fits the webpage to the screen, so there's no left and right scrolling.

The browser can download any of the formats that the Pandigital Novel supports (listed below). If a memory card is installed the download generally goes there, so it will need to be imported by tapping the icon.

Video Functions

The Pandigital Novel supports MPEG4 video format. Unfortunately the browser doesn't support Flash so video websites like Hulu and YouTube are out.

Pandigital Novel Photos

I tested two videos and they worked. One video was smooth and the other jerked a bit during play.

The picture quality is pretty good for such a small screen. The device also comes with a little stand that works well for watching videos and slideshows in landscape orientation.

Pictures

Given Pandigital's background, it's no surprise that the Novel also doubles as a photo frame/viewer. It supports JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP image files.

There's a slideshow feature with a number of different settings for speed adjustment, playlists, and adding music.

Music and Audio

There's a built-in audio player that supports MP3, WMA, and AAC formats. Two speakers and a headphone jack are located on the bottom edge of the device. The volume buttons are on the right side. The speakers sound about as good as you'd expect—they get the job done and they are louder than most ereaders.

Audio functions include setting playlists, shuffle, and repeat. Sort by title or artist. Minimize the audio menu to keep listening while doing other tasks.

Bottom Line

The Pandigital Novel is an ereader combined with a mobile computer. While it isn't particularly proficient at either, for the price it's enough to attract a wide audience.

The fact that it combines so many different elements into one gives it an edge, playing video, reading, internet, email, etc. And being tied in with Barnes and Noble is going to do a lot for its image (pardon the pun).

Firmware updates are needed to improve the functionality of the device, there's no doubt about it. As to how Pandigital will handle this remains to be seen.

Aside from the buggy firmware, the biggest thing hurting the Novel is the fact that it can't install Android apps.

And the fact that its ebook reading app isn't very polished and doesn't allow for any customizing in font type, background color, margins, line height, etc.

Overall, it seems something like the Archos 7 or some other Android tablet might be a better option for those looking for an internet/multimedia device combined with an ereader because of the ability to install apps, especially with all the ebook stores releasing Android apps now—at least there'd be more options. Given that, I don't see the Pandigital Novel being a major competitor anytime soon, but if they can keep the price under $200 then there might be a lot of them in consumer's hands by the end of the year, especially given its widespread retail presence.