14 DAY TRIAL // Pandigital finally made the official introduction of the SuperNova, a mobile electronic that, depending on who you ask, is either an e-reader or a tablet.
The one thing that works as a turnoff for many on the tablet front is that this sector is one of many models but few successes.
Basically, many tablets were introduced over the past year and a half, but only a handful of those had any measure of success.
As such, even though there are devices that have enough slate-like features to qualify as one, people can't really blame their makers for not advertising them as slates.
The first outfit that comes to mind is B&N (Barnes and Noble), whose Nook Color e-book reader falls just barely short of tablet-hood.
Now, Pandigital has added its name to the group of such companies, having created the SuperNova tab, measuring 8 inches in diagonal.
Priced at $230 (171.19 Euro according to exchange rates), it works on a single-core A8 ARM CPU (clock speed of 1 GHz), has 4 GB of built-in flash storage and a microSD card slot (32 GB max).
WiFi and Bluetooth are both present, as is the Gingerbread OS (Android 2.3), instead of honeycomb (Android 3.0-3.2).
"We are excited to deliver our most comprehensive tablet yet – one that offers many of the advanced features and functionality of higher priced tablets - at a price that's affordable to consumers," said John Clough, president, Pandigital.
"We added some features to the SuperNova that we didn't offer in previous versions of our tablets, but felt were important to the consumer for this flagship product, including an 8-inch capacitive touchscreen display and integrated Bluetooth."
Pandigital's SuperNove has Adube Flash 10.3 support, access to the Barnes & Noble's eStore and the GetJar app store. Sales will start at the middle of the ongoing month (October, 2011).