14 DAY TRIAL // As expected, many new products, and previously detailed ones, were shown off at this year's Computex electronics event in Taipei, though the first two days mostly saw the media being mindful of the many media slates. On the other hand, product types that saw a significant attention at CeBIT and CES weren't as abundant now as they were then. This can be said to apply to e-readers, among other things, but Pandigital has decided to try and make amends by finally selling the Novel.
What will immediately strike onlookers is the presence of color. So far, with the exception of a few prototypes that haven't yet reached stores, most e-book reading devices used the same e-paper screens manufactured by E-Ink. Though lacking in color support, this technology has served the market well because it has a very low power draw. Demand for color has become great, however, which gives Pandigital's Novel an advantage.
The Novel has a 7-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) with a native resolution of 800 x 600 pixels and support for touch input. It runs the Android operating system. The internal memory only amounts to 1GB, but a 2-in-1 card reader lets that capacity be expanded by up to 32GB. Additionally, a mini USB 2.0 port will let files be copied to and from a host PC, whereas the 802.11 b/g/n WiFi will enable the wireless acquisition of books from Barnes and Noble.
The Novel will read books in EPUB and PDF formats, display JPEG, BMP, PNG and GIF images, play audio encoded in MP3, AAC and WAV even MPEG4 videos. There are also some pre-loaded games, for entertainment during reading breaks, as well as a dictionary, among other things. Listed here, it is currently priced at $250, more than the $200 initially planned, and backed by a one-year warranty.