Last weekend, I posted that I’d bought a new Pandigital Novel for $130 ($170 – coupon – mail-in-rebate), then hacked it to run Kindle for Android. Although I was excited by the prospect of a cheap full color Kindle tablet, I complained about the somewhat glitchy software and performance.

And now I don’t own it anymore because I took it back.

In that earlier post, I cursed Pandigital for not making a better product. It’s naive of me to lay any blame at Pandigital’s feet, though. The fact is, they’re delivering a lot of features and hardware for the price point: a decently sized color LCD screen, a touchscreen interface, a robust and open operating system, access to a major bookseller right out of the box, Wi-Fi access, a decent battery, and a durable shell, all for significantly less than $200.

On paper, that is a pretty awesome kit.

The reality, however, is that to reach that low price point, you have to cut corners. The technology just isn’t there yet to put top-of-the-line tech into such a cheap device. So the default ereader isn’t very polished or visually appealing, the touchscreen is the old-fashioned resistive kind, the processor stutters during bigger transitions or animations, ebook files take a long time to open, apps freeze and require a reboot.

And the thing is heavy. This is partly a psychological effect, a consequence of what you expect something that size to weigh. I’ve held both the iPad and the Novel, and although the Novel is significantly lighter than the iPad, oddly the iPad feels “less heavy” in the hand (not lighter–it’s a perception thing), because its larger size primes your brain to anticipate some heft.

You can see from the video demo below that I managed to get the Novel customized to my satisfaction. It was pretty easy; with the exception of a software hack that remapped the volume buttons so that they’d function as menu buttons, it was just a matter of installing programs that I wanted to run (the default interface is still there, but it doesn’t appear unless I want it to.)

(Also, my apologies for the low quality of the video. I’d already returned the Novel before reviewing this footage and didn’t realize how blown out the screens looked.)

It wasn’t all disappointment. I spent the weekend reading books and comics on it, and for the most part, I liked the screen and the size of the Novel.

For books, it’s a perfect screen size, and I loved reading on it. I think for casual reading the Kindle 2 eInk screen is too gray, and the iPad in general is too big; the Novel’s screen is what I want an ereader screen to be. For comics, it’s almost perfect, but just a little bit smaller than I like. Because I want to be able to view comics at full size, I’ll probably end up going with something iPad-sized (assuming I can afford it some day).

I had a lot of trouble deciding whether or not to keep the Pandigital Novel. For the first three days of ownership, the underlying firmware was annoyingly buggy: the keyboard was almost unusable, Wi-Fi connectivity was spotty at best, and it sometimes froze. Apple has raised the bar so high on “it just works” user experiences that I couldn’t see myself wasting time in the coming months constantly tinkering with a device when all I wanted was to turn it on and start reading.

Then the day before I returned it, Pandigital released a firmware update. I installed it and was happy to see it fixed the keyboard issue and improved overall speed, and the Wi-Fi spottiness seemed at least slightly better. This makes me optimistic that if you buy a Pandigital Novel in three months, you’ll find the overall experience much more user-friendly than I did. (But of course, remember that you’ll need some basic geek skills to install Kindle for Android on it; otherwise you’ll be stuck with only Barnes & Noble books.)

In the end, what finally convinced me to take it back was my iPhone. Every time I put down the Novel and picked up my iPhone, I was struck by the vast difference in user experiences between the two. It was like riding a pogo stick, then getting on a bicycle, then going back to a pogo stick.

Let’s be realistic, though. There’s no <$200 iPad out there in the marketplace. If you want a cheap but functional tablet, this is pretty much your only choice–and I’m not sure another company would be able to come out with anything better at the same price point. If you’re a hobbyist or gadget geek who is used to coddling/customizing devices, it’s really not a bad value. If you’re just looking for a really smooth ereader experience, I’d suggest you keep waiting. The technology is only going to get better.

It’s true! If you’ve got some tech/geek skills, a little patience, $150, and a Bed Bath & Beyond nearby, you too can become the proud owner of a color touch screen Wi-Fi enabled Amazon Kindle!

Sort of.

Last week, several awesome people posted instructions on how to hack the new Pandigital Novel 7″ eReader, a somewhat janky, low-budget ebook reader that just came out. Emboldened by boredom and my own stupidity (the two things that usually embolden me, to be honest), I decided to try it out for myself.

Several hours later–I’m going to say six, because I was interrupted by dinner, TV, and sleep–I now have a portable Wi-Fi tablet running Kindle for Android.

So yes, it does indeed work, and no, you don’t have to be brilliant to pull it off. But I have lots of mixed feelings about it.

First, here is a summary of what I did.

Step 1: Register a new email address at bedbathandbeyond.com so that you can receive a 20% off coupon. You’ll need to print this coupon and bring it to the store with you.

Step 2: While you’re on the site, go to the product page and download the Pandigital $20 Mail In Rebate form (PDF) for later.

Step 3: Now get dressed and go to a physical Bed Bath & Beyond. (Yes, I know you were in your underwear at home.) Don’t bother looking for the device; it’s almost certainly in the back, because Pandigital had to pull all the inventory and issue a firmware upgrade a couple of weeks ago right after they first went on sale. (I told you the device was janky.) Just go to customer service and ask for it there.

The device retails at BB&B for $170, but with your 20% off coupon you can get it with tax for under $150. After the mail-in-rebate, it’s theoretically possible to get the price down to $130–hence the headline of this post. But some companies are notorious for abusing mail-in-rebate rules to deny valid rebates, and I don’t have any experience with Pandigital to know whether to expect them to come through. Buyer beware and all that.

Step 4: Bring home your new halfwitted Pandigital Novel, plug it in so it can charge, and turn it on. Now marvel at the slow, unresponsive interface! Seriously, I suspect nobody at Pandigital actually tried using this device before shipping it. It’s more or less unusable in its factory-fresh state, which is sad.

(On the other hand, if you’d rather use the Barnes & Noble ebook store for all your reading, you can stop right here and just use it as is. You’re probably better off buying a Nook, though.)

Step 5: Make sure there’s enough juice in the battery, then go to this page and follow this guy’s instructions. He’ll walk you through a multi-step process that will:

• install a special driver on your Windows PC so it can talk to the Pandigital Novel via USB cable
• install a software hack that will turn the volume up/down buttons on the Pandigital into “Menu” and “Back” buttons
• install a user-friendly replacement home screen that you will use instead of the heavily restricted default one

I think I followed the instructions precisely, but I have to say things didn’t unfold exactly as written. I never saw any “Success” or “Reboot the Novel” messages on the PC or the device, and I was worried that things weren’t working. It all turned out okay in the end, however.

Also: the instructions explain that you can now install other Android apps–for example, Kindle for Android. If you know your way around a command line interface (really you just need to know the commands DIR and CD) it’s easy. If not, you can open the web browser on the device and install Amazon for Kindle directly via this link, which goes to a public Dropbox account hosting the apk installer.

When you finally get everything working, you’ll be able to fire up the Kindle for Android app, download your purchases, and start reading.

Now a whole slew of warnings. Why so many? Because after playing around with this thing for the past several hours I’ve got a lot of misgivings about it.

• Hardware issues (yes, there are a lot)
  • I think it’s a nice size, but it’s heavy.
  • The touchscreen layer buckles in the center slightly on my model (you can’t see it, but you can feel it when pressing).
  • It’s a resistive touchscreen, not capacitive, so that means no multitouch and you have to press fairly hard (compared to an iPhone or iPad) to register a touch.
  • It’s sloooowwww; it seems like Pandigital took a page from Nokia’s playbook and deliberately underpowered the poor thing, probably to save money and battery life.
  • Even the included plastic stand is badly designed, so that the power cable falls out and you have to use both hands to insert the device when you want to use it.
• Software and firmware issues
  • It freezes up frequently. Sometimes it starts working again after several minutes, and sometimes you have to reboot.
  • There seems to be a bug with the Wi-Fi connection so that when you return from sleep mode, it refuses to scan for wireless networks. Fiddling with it via various setting screens and/or removing the SD card sometimes works, but not always. Reboot!
  • As a result of cutting corners on the processor, there’s not a single aspect of the device that you can call “snappy” or “responsive”–you will need to get used to pressing, waiting, and sometimes pressing again.
  • The on-screen keyboard is slow and frequently reads your press for the wrong key, resulting in an estimated one hundred million typos per typing session.
  • There are some issues with the auto-rotation–different issues depending on which launcher you install and/or which app you’re using at the time.

In general, I’d say this is sort of the electronic equivalent of an old car you keep around because you like to tinker with it; it will run sometimes, but other times you’ll have to open the hood and start messing with things.

As to whether I’ll keep it, I haven’t decided yet. I can’t say enough bad things about Pandigital after today, and I can confidently say that without discounts, the Pandigital Novel is insanely overpriced considering it’s almost unusable fresh out of the box.

Even so, I might keep it because I do like the size of it–not too big or too small–and I like that I can access not just my Kindle ebooks and personal ePub library, but also comics. That’s a great thing to have for less than a third of the price of the cheapest iPad.

But just to be clear, this is a poor man’s iPad in every aspect: speed, touchscreen technology, memory, battery life, connectivity, and materials.

If you can live with all that, and if you don’t mind troubleshooting a device on a regular basis, good luck. Maybe I’ll see you around on the slatedroid.com Pandigital forums.

It took a while, but Amazon has finally released a free Kindle app for the Android platform. At last, the Kindle store is being thrown open to those of you who own one of the many Android-powered smartphones out there, or who plan to buy one of the super-charged new models coming out this year.

As far as functionality, it looks like it’s basically the same as the Blackberry and iPhone apps. But don’t expect to read enhanced audio/video Kindle books on it–that’s an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch exclusive for the present.

But back to Android: you can download it directly to your phone by searching for “Kindle” in the Android Market, or if you have a barcode scanner app on your phone, just scan this QR Code:

Amazon says you’ll need to be running Android OS 1.6 or higher to install the app.

Oh also: it doesn’t run on the Nook, even though the Nook uses Android. I think I’ll shoot an email to Barnes & Noble and ask them to fix this. =)

So far we’ve got access to the Amazon Kindle ecosystem on the iPhone and iPod Touch, Windows PCs, Blackberry devices, and naturally Kindles. Next up appears to be devices running Android, the operating system Google developed mainly for smartphones, although other types of gadgets are starting to make use of it too.

The biggest impact will be on phones. If Android gets a Kindle app, then owners of phones like the Droid, the Nexus One, and the original G1 may eventually be able to buy and read Kindle books.

Beyond that, though, are a small but growing number of devices that use Android. The Entourage eDGe, a combo E-ink/LCD dual-screen tablet, uses Android to power the LCD side of things; currently it uses a proprietary bookstore, but it’s possible that in the future an eDGe owner could buy ebooks from Amazon as well. Dell’s new iPod Touch competitor, the Mini 5 (or maybe it’s called the Streak?) uses Android and has confirmed that it will have a Kindle app.

As a side note, the Nook ereader from Barnes & Noble also uses Android to power its mini-nav color LCD section, but somehow I doubt that any Nook owners will be seeing an Amazon Kindle store any time soon.

The main question now, especially for Android smartphone owners, is when will this version be released? Unfortunately even the rumor sites don’t have that information yet, although Dell’s Mini 5 is likely to go on sale within the next 2-6 months.

“Leaked Dell Streak flyer shows multitude of color options, confirmed specifications” [Engadget]