Pandigital Nova Tablet – Review
At a third of the price of Apple’s iPad 2, the Pandigital Nova brings a few economies vis-a-vis more expensive tablets.
At 13.6 inches the Nova is light for a 7″ tablet. The Pandigital Nova’s case is hard, black plastic and the 7.6 x 5.2 x 0.5-inch device feels chunky. The Kindle Fire and Nook Color are both more svelte. For navigation there are four physical buttons – Home, Back, Options, and Search. There is slight ‘play’ in the button’s mounting, and they feel cheap and poorly engineered – sometimes we had to press a button twice or with unusual force.
Connectivity is not bad at all on the Pandigital Nova; there are USB and microHDMI ports, a microSD reader, and of course, that all-important headphone jack. The microSD card should be useful, because the Nova comes with a paltry 4GB of internal memory. At this price level, we wouldn’t expect breath-takingly vibrant or high-definition visuals, but the Nova’s 7″ 800 x 600 pixel display is precise and very acceptable, though video playback can be a bit pixellated. Viewing angles are poor – this device is only suitable for single-person viewing. In combination with the reflective screen, the poor viewing angles make it awkward to use the Pandigital Nova outside, far from ideal for an eReader. The solitary speaker on the rear produces loud if tinny audio.
A resistive screen is nearly always a bad sign with a budget tablet, and in this case meant often having to double-tap or apply heavy pressure to register inputs. Multitouch gestures are also difficult to accomplish – press-and-hold is too often interpreted as a click, and zooming in and out in Angry Birds was a pain. Nor are sluggish responses to taps particularly welcome.
Images taken with the 1.3MP rear-facing camera are actually well-lit with accurate colours but detail is poor with jagged edges. It’s on a par with a budget camera-phone. The front-facing VGA camera is worse, with bleached images and jolty, pixellated video capture at the maximum res of 352 x 288 pixels.
The Nova runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a 558-MHz ARM 7 CPU, and gets above-average scores for a budget tablet in benchmarks. Navigating menus and launching apps is acceptable for a $200 tablet. One drawback is the lack of Android App Store support. In its place is GetJar, with its limited selection of apps. Pre-loaded apps include Barnes and Noble’s app. There’s also Facebook, a dictionary, calculator, email, YouTube, weather, and a naff office suite, which allows viewing of documents, but not creation.
As an eReader the Nova is not bad – very user-friendly, a good homescreen shows all your books, magazines and newspapers, easily accessible from customizable shelves. Reading them delivers clear, sharp text in any of five sizes. Inverting the black text and white background helps in poor lighting, and handy functions are offered for searching text or bookmarking. Tapping a word highlights it, allowing users to look it up in the dictionary, search on Google, or launch a menu for making notes. The browser works quite snappily but ,yet again, pinch-to-zoom can be problematical.
In battery tests the device lasted only four-and-a-half hours – shocking in comparison with the 6 hr 50 minutes tablet average.
Better outside use would make this an acceptable budget eReader, as it is, a raft of better alternatives are available.
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