My first foray into the tablet world was when I acquired a Bed Bath and Beyond gift card at a 50% discount. I also had one of their readily available 20% off coupons, so armed with these discounts, I decided to try out the Pandigital Novel e-reader they were promoting as a back to school special; I got it for around $100 after savings.
Now, the Novel is not a bad device aesthetically, except for the fact that the designer didn't think to move the power plug from the left middle edge of the device down to the bottom, which was a little odd. That aside, while heavy for its size, the Novel seemed like good value.
After powering on the Android-based device and unlocking it to install other programs, like Amazon's Kindle app, I tried reading some ebooks. Unfortunately, no matter how I turned the screen, I got a kind of moire or rainbow effect which made it nearly impossible to focus on reading. I suspect that the touch-layer of the screen was designed with poor quality materials. In addition, the resistive touchscreen required quite a bit of brute force and use of a fingernail to actually turn pages, since there were no Next/Previous page buttons. I decided this was not worth hassling with.
Needless to say, the Novel went back to the store, courtesy of BB&B's excellent return policy.
What did I learn? Don't go cheap, avoid resistive touchscreens, and don't buy computer-type devices from companies best known for making digital picture frames and similarly low-tech electronics.
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