This week Pandigital announced a strong alternative to the iPad and Kindle. On spec, the Pandigital Novel is inferior to the iPad in a lot of ways, but given both products will be obsolete within 12 months, the Novel may be a better way to cut your teeth on a tablet particularly if you want to use it as a reader, which is where it shines against the iPad. I had a chance to play with one for a few minutes and was actually impressed that it is, for right now, a potentially better tablet then the iPad is for most of us.
Pandigital Novel 7" tablet
For under $200, I am willing to mess around with things that I may end up sitting on a shelf for most of their lives. If it is more than $500, I want to be really sure that the product is something I will actually use. For those of us who are married this is because our spouses are really interested in things over $500 and not so interested in things at the lower price point and are more likely to forgive and forget the lower priced mistake. The killer aspect of the Pandigital Novel is that it costs under $200 and if you aren’t sure about a tablet, this is a much safer area to experiment with. In addition, if this is going to be a gift to a child, a $200 broken product is much less likely to result in a traumatic moment between you and that child than a $500+ product is.
These things are played with a lot and they are going to get dropped and broken. There is no real way to avoid that with kids or many adults.
An additional thing to consider is that this product, and everything it this class including the iPad, will be obsolete in 12 months. This isn’t uncommon for a new product and I’ve found I can live with it much more easily at under $200.
Better Reader
The Pandigital Novel has been tuned to be a reader. The TFT display, like the iPads, isn’t as good at text as the Kindle’s ePaper but it has been set to automatically dim when reading a book to increase contrast and it uses a low reflective surface which resists glare making it easier on the eyes for reading. In addition, it weighs much less than the iPad does, which you’ll appreciate if you are holding and reading a book at length. Serious readers will likely still prefer the Kindle but those that like to read less often and want to consume their magazines and newspapers in color should find the Novel better than the iPad in terms of eye fatigue. However, at an estimated 6 hours of battery life the Novel won’t last as long, which reduces its advantage for, ironically, reading novels.
Barnes & Noble is the connected eBook store for the Novel and second only to Amazon’s. It is better by far than what is available initially on the iPad (however you can get a Kindle app for the iPad). I constantly test the availability of books I want to read on both the Kindle and the Barnes & Noble store: My latest search using the new Dresden Files book “Changes” found the title as available in the Barnes & Noble store, but not in the Kindle store. Given it is $12.95 in Barnes & Noble’s eBook store and would typically be $9.95 on the Kindle, I’ll bet this has to do with a price dispute, but when I want to read a book $3 doesn’t make that much difference to me, particularly if I can’t buy it at the lower price.
Games, Movies, etc.
This device uses the Android store, which isn’t as good as iTunes for this kind of content and with only 1 GB of memory your capacity to hold lots of content is limited. Still, you’ll typically stream movies and TV shows most of the time and for either the iPad or Novel this will be done over Wi-Fi (AT&T blocks streaming over the iPad’s 3G service, which would likely be rather disappointing anyway). Most of the initial applications, much like it was initially with the iPad, are designed for Android phones and may not translate well to a larger tablet just yet.
I have a number of peers who are also using the iPad instead of a notebook computer. In that role, the Novel is inadequate.
Wrapping Up
For folks who have bought and love the iPad the Pandigital Novel won’t be very interesting. But for people who want to start exploring what a tablet can do, and particularly who want to start reading on one, the Novel may be a strong alternative to either the iPad or the Kindle. Heavy book readers will prefer the Kindle and those who want something that could actually replace their laptop will prefer the iPad.
For me, $500 is just too much to spend for where this technology is at the moment. There are too many variables that will need to be worked out over the next 24 months to make that kind of investment sound reasonable. However, I can justify $199. As it is the case so often with Apple products, the iPad is clearly the Lexus in this class. I’m thinking that most of us would likely be better off with a Toyota.
Rob Enderle is one of the last Inquiry Analysts. Inquiry Analysts are paid to stay up to date on current events and identify trends and either explain the trends or make suggestions, tactical and strategic, on how to best take advantage of them. Currently he provides his services to most of the major technology and media companies.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer
