[Xanthe]

First impressions of the PDN:

1. It is much heavier than my ALP or Sony.

2. Battery time is nowhere near that of an e-ink or reflective LCD device.

3. The device, out of the box, is easy to operate.

4. The touch screen is more responsive than I thought it would be. But the screen quickly becomes covered with fingerprint smudges [EDIT: merely unsightly, doesn't seem to affect performance].

5. It doesn't come with a stylus, but it does come with a stand for hand's free reading.

6. I've got a 50+ character key for my wireless. I kept getting "wrong key" errors when trying to enter it. I finally set up a guest account on my wireless router with a smaller guest key and was able to connect with that.

7. Connecting to my B&N account was no problem, nor was updating my Library from it.

8. Updating the firmware was not difficult. I just followed the instructions on the PDN website.

9. One of the first things I did was to replace the internal 1GB micro SD card with a 16GB micro SDHC card. That was easy to do. The PDN website has step-by-step instructions with pictures. Prior to doing that, though, I went into the PDN with Explorer and copied everything on the SD card to my hard drive, in a folder clearly marked that it was the original data.

10. I have to say, one of the problems I'm having is the different terminology used in regard to Android products. To me, FW is firewall not firmware. "Repos" is repossession not repository in my mind. "Flashing" isn't exactly installing, according to what I've been told. I'm not quite sure of the difference between "hacking", "rooting" and "modding". This tends to make information/instructions on the Android forums a bit hard to understand.

11. The screen is not as sharp as my laptop's screen. The text in the reader function should be darker/bolder for my eyes. I haven't found a way of adjusting that to my satisfaction yet.

12. I decided to use the nchnter_experience modification because it seemed to play nicer than the roebeet one according to the threads I was reading. The downside is that it doesn't give you access to Android Marketplace, which seems to be the easiest and safest source of Android applications. I had no problem installing it. I used the 9/23 version but before I installed...er...flashed it to my system, I reverted the PDN operating system to the 9/23 version to avoid problems.

13. I'm still trying to figure everything out. I miss the darn "x" in the upper corner of the window - I have directional difficulties at times (forward? back? close?). [EDIT: this refers to it as a hacked Android tablet, not the basic PDN mode.]

14. Opera has a Beta version out for Android, which I managed to find and figure out which one I should use - AND managed to download it to my PC. I was able to install it without problem; nice to have a familiar browser. There's a lot of Android apps out there but a lot of the websites only provide access to them via your mobile phone, which doesn't quite work in this instance.

15. I haven't loaded any PDF's on it yet so I can't comment on how they look. A YouTube video played without problem - it wasn't that sharp-looking but I don't know if it was the 'tube or my screen. Haven't loaded any music on it (it has two speakers on the bottom edge of the device).

I already know that I don't like to read for extended periods of time on an LCD screen, so that wasn't my primary reason for getting this device. I'm mainly looking for it to fill the category of a poor-man's iPad. The mods/hacks have turned it into an full-fledged Android device which is easier for me to browse on than an cell phone, which is what I wanted, so so far, I am happy.

Note: The white PDN runs Android 2.0. The black PDN supposedly runs Android 1.5.