Pandigital Novel first impressions

[MikeFromHC]

Originally Posted by lotrfan

Per your comment I take it the video works fine. Can you elaborate? I have a raincheck and I am looking forward to this device but it really needs to do the basic stuff right as I am not going to count on future apps. It would be great for future os updates and apps but we can't really rely on that happening.

I just ran the included video but it shows a lot of motion and ran smoothly.
The picture section has a choice where a photo flys in while spinning and it shows smoothly.
The main point I was trying to make is that the page turn can be sped up. It is not limited by the hardware.
Typing is also fast.
The other apps are pretty basic but they work OK.

The book management is about as good as it gets compared to other systems but it is still poor.
One thing I found that helps a little is that you can drop folders into the reader folder and add a bit more management through the USB side.

Buy a stylus or sharpen your fingernails. A few of the buttons are almost impossible to hit with short nails.

[lotrfan]

Originally Posted by MikeFromHC

I just ran the included video but it shows a lot of motion and ran smoothly.
The picture section has a choice where a photo flys in while spinning and it shows smoothly.
The main point I was trying to make is that the page turn can be sped up. It is not limited by the hardware.
Typing is also fast.
The other apps are pretty basic but they work OK.

The book management is about as good as it gets compared to other systems but it is still poor.
One thing I found that helps a little is that you can drop folders into the reader folder and add a bit more management through the USB side.

Buy a stylus or sharpen your fingernails. A few of the buttons are almost impossible to hit with short nails.

Thanks for the info. I understand your point regarding the turning page speed and agree. Hope they can fix these issues.

[Big Shirley]

Thank you for the great points of view! Nate the Great and Cold Sun thank you for the informative sparring. I am going to pick one up today for my kids.

[7tronics]

I'm new to Android, though not to Linux on PCs. I see rated life at 6 hours on the Pandigital (which is similar to what I see on the Augen "The Book" experiences summarized here.

Has the battery life been impacted by new firmware?

Once apps can be installed, is there any app which allows for running in less responsive and lower power mode (other than the obvious adjusting screen intensity down)? I have turned intensity down, but the mid-July firmware (and that released first week of Aug) have a bug where the screen display intensity is "forgotten" across a suspend or power-down/up cycle. Clicking into "Settings" restores the previously set intensity without activating the control.

Liberal use of standby mode keeps the Novel alive all day without recharge, nice! Especially since it doesn't charge through USB cable.

Tx, Mark

[skyline]

Originally Posted by jswinden

I can't help but wonder if a big part of the problems that plague the various Android tablets is Android itself. Android just doesn't seem to be a reliable OS for tablets. I guess it might work okay with phones. It seems to me that this is what would have happened had someone tried to use the old PalmOS 5.x on something more powerful than a PDA. PalmOS was okay, not stellar, on PDAs, so putting it on a tablet would have been a disaster. I've now owned or played with a few Android tablets and they were all extremely disappointing as far as the OS and firmware is concerned. And contrary to what some believe, I'm a firm believer that a reader/tablet needs to be intuitive and usable by non-techies. If you have to be a programmer to get the darn thing to work then it won't have a large sales base. So IMHO Android is too high maintenance to appeal to a large sales base.

As much as I hate Steve Jobs--I actually like Apple--I have to admit the appeal of the iPad is its simplicity to operate. If someone could do that on a tablet hardware without all of the Jobs controls and high prices, and if they used standard ports and protocols, they would have a great tablet.

We haven't seen any "proper" high spec android tablets yet, the next version of android will be optimized for multimedia and higher resolutions and the big players will release their products by the end of the year so it is probably too early to judge.