The Pandigital Novel originally debuted earlier on the year and was plagued from the get go with firmware problems and eventually the units got recalled. This was not the ideal situation new companies want to start with to get the public behind their e-readers. Word is that now that 9 inch version of the Android tablet is on sale for 213.00 via QVC.
Hopefully Pandigital has learned from their mistakes with their latest offering, and people have been asking us, what does the follow up offer to a skeptical public?
First of all, it features a 9 inch diagonal full-color resistive touchscreen display. It has 2 GB of internal memory to store around one thousand ebooks and even comes with a 4GB microSD memory card. It has built in WI-FI that will allow you to do business with the Barnes and Noble eBook Store.
Now lets talk a bit about content. If you are getting this device to read ebooks primarily, it will support the ePUB and PDF formats. ePub is the format of choice from Barnes and Noble, and you can buy ebooks from other stores that support that format, such as Kobo, and use Adobe Digital Editions to copy it to your device. If you download Non-DRM eBooks from the internet, you can copy them to your device with little problems.
The new Pandigital 9 Inch Novel will support audio, pictures and video formats as well. For Audio it supports MP3, AAC and Wav, so you can listen to music on the go, or audio books. If you are down to copy your picture library to the device it supports JPEG, BMP, PNG and GIF. Sadly for video it only does MPG4. The device also has a headphone jack, so you can listen to whats playing, without making anyone around you irate.
Although the exact version of Google Android being used on this device is unknown, we can expect from the pictures that we have seen that it is running Android 1.5, which is the same version as the 7 inch version of the Novel.
With this latest iteration from Pandigital it would have made sense to give it another name then the Novel, which is the exact same name as their previous offering. When we reported the device clearing the FCC earlier in the month, we expected a new name. The name we were given was the Pandigital AW-NU7, which likely does not have markting departments thinking of witty catch phrases. Having only the size differences, to differentiate the two devices will likely confuse customers, but this fits Pandigitals MO very well.
Will Pandigital get it right this time with this tablet? Or is it just a bigger version of the original Novel?
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
