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290 Posts
Well, I did try, honest. I really wanted to love the little fella, did all the hacks, installed software and gave it love, but in the end it just didn't make the grade so I returned it to BBB a couple of hours ago and got my money back.Before I give a mini review, I have to fess up and admit that I owned an iPad before, sold it, got the PDN, and bought another iPad yesterday, so I can't claim to be unbiased and I also, probably unjustly expected more of the PDN. Also I travel a lot overseas and spend a bunch of time in planes, airports and hotels so my criteria for what makes a tablet or netbook usable is probably different from most other people here.What I liked about it:-1) Build quality - I thought it was very well constructed and had a lot more quality to it than the Augen 78 which although I never bought, I played with for about 30 minutes. I had the PDN for almost a month and no sign of cracks or defects at all.2) Weight - I liked that it was heavy and felt substantial and not flimsey. Maybe a shade lighter would have been a bonus, but can't complain.3) Aspect ratio - 800 x 600 is the best for me. Good for reading books / pdfs and for displaying web pages. 800 x 480 is just too narrow when in portrait mode and needs more scrolling when in landscape.4) Video Player - This seemed to work fine. I tried a couple of different videos on it; a ripped movie for iPhone and one shot from my camera. Both worked great and I could easily have watched a full movie on a plane or sitting in an airport.What I didn't like about it:- (note some of these could probably be fixed by firmware upgrades)1) Slow - even with the 7-24 update it still took too long to open apps. Scrolling was slow and not very precise. Obviously comparing it to the iPad is totally unfair but when you get used to a capacitance, multitouch and high res screen, it difficult not to compare unfavourably. One thing I will say and this may just be my imagination. The browser and email seemed to open up faster using the PDN standard interface rather than Pandahome launcher. I thought it was just a figment of my imagination and should have clocked both to see. I was running the hacked 7-24 and the JIT and still things seemed pretty slow.2) No true sleep mode - Real ballache to put it in sleep overnight and find the battery was almost dead in the morning.3) WiFi - reconnecting from sleep was a pain in the arse and the reception footprint was pretty poor. My iPad and iPhone and Blackberry can get WiFi in any room in the house, the PDN was pretty much limited to the living room where the router is. Maybe not such a big deal for others but was for me. Also WiFi was slow. I did a pageload test this morning on the iPad and PDN. The iPad beat it by miles. The worst thing though was inability to reconnect automatically on wake up.4) Screen response - Yes I know it is a resistive screen and I actually used a stylus most of the time, which was no hardship at all, but the response was still pretty poor. My old ipaq which I dug out to compare it with was far better. In fairness, though, maybe that's because I was used to pressing harder on the ipaq screen than on the PDN.5) Lack of apps - this one is not the PDNs fault, because I needed to do the ugly hack to get to use the android app store, but, there seemed to be a real paucity of apps in it. I suspect I wasn't getting the full list because things like Bloomberg and USA Today are supposed to be there but they never showed. Another problem with apps was that many of the ones I wanted to use didn't work fully or crashed.6) Integration - Took a whole bunch of fiddling and different apps to try to get email to save attachments and play them. Classic case. Vonage phone messages are wav files. Just couldn't get the PDN to play them at all.Other things that bugged me:-1) The fact that Pandigital didn't seem to give a crap about the community here. OK, no real reason why they should but they seemed to lead us on and promised firmware source, but never came up with anything at all. In fact they seemed to have lurked here, took the info that we provided and then locked the black version down even tighter. Granted the PDN is a reader that is built on android and they most likely only want it to stay that way, but, I would have thought that they would have welcomed a testbed like this to help iron out bugs and show just what the unit was capable off.2) No official Pandigital case - I suspect that they won't have any for the white version because the black one will be out soon and it is smaller so they didn't manufacture any for the white one. I would guess they will have cases ready when the black one ships.That's about it. Probably unfair on the PDN because it really is a cheap little device with rebates and does pretty much what it is designed to do. There is nothing to say I won't get a black one if it gets rooted and 2.1 or even 2.2 can get installed on it, but at the minute I'm waiting to see what the Cruz has to offer. That has the advantage that it will be the sister of a tablet they will release at the same time and if the hardware is pretty much the same then it may be possible to just overwrite the reader firmware with the tablet firmware. Personally i think that if that is the case you will see the PDN forum here die very quickly. I hope not because I think if Pandigital had done the decent thing the people here who have spent a lot of time and effort getting the device to where it is now would have been well rewarded.I'll be lurking to see the developments.
