Refurbished: Pandigital Novel 6" Touchscreen E-Reader w/ ePaper Display, Wi-Fi & 2GB Drive - $25 w/ FS

SDRebel
VanillaXtract
jerritp
Thank you for answering my question!

Quote from drowles : 2) 6 hours battery life doesn't seem very good, but...

That's an error. That's the spec for the color device. This is the ePaper / eInk device which has a battery life rated as 6000 "page turns." (I'm sure that's with WiFi turned off.)

The B&W ePaper display is very clear and readable, with a very wide range of viewing angles, though it needs pretty bright light for best readability (like a book!). I don't think it's quite as contrasty as the latest Kindle, but I've not put the two side-by-side, so I might be wrong about that. I have no complaints about the display, it's very nice.

There's no paper manual (just a very brief "Quick Start Guide"), and I didn't find a manual on line. But there's a 146-page "User Guide" preloaded under "My Library." The User Guide says (p. 114) that you can download a copy of the User Guide from www.pandigital.net/downloads but that is UNTRUE. They have downloadable User Guides there for other models, but not this one. There are some copies of it elsewhere on the Web, though, including here:
http://tabletsetc.com/upload/manu...manual.pdf

For library e-lending, and various other tasks, Adobe Digital Editions is required; get it here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/
It requires registration, but registration is free.

The touch-screen supports two gestures: "tap" and "swipe" (swipe right-to-left to go to the next page, or swipe left-to-right to go back one page).

The unit seems a bit sluggish, especially the Web browser. The Web browser does work, but if I tap something (touch screen link or physical button), very often nothing at all seems to happen for several seconds, sometimes even 30 seconds. Sometimes it eventually does something, but sometimes it never does. There's no "busy" indicator to let me know whether I should just keep waiting or not. Often the on-screen keyboard doesn't pop up when it should. The Gmail webmail user interface was unusable, but I was able to send and receive email with Yahoo's webmail interface.

At first, sound didn't seem to work. The volume control provides no audible feedback. I plugged in a computer headset and thought I played the sample music file, but no sound came out at all. It turns out that I needed to put a check-mark in the box next to the music file, to enable it, before playing it.

The volume is a bit on the low side, I doubt I'll ever use it on anything except maximum volume, even with headphones, but it does work, and with headphones the sound quality is good.

Alarms are similar. I set alarms to go off a few minutes in the future, and when the times came absolutely nothing happened. It turned out that I needed to put a check mark in the box next to the alarm to enable it. It's not very loud; if you're a sound sleeper, it might not awaken you.

There's no option for a "click" feedback sound to indicate when you've clicked something or typed a virtual key. I wish that was an option.

At first I thought there was no accelerometer / gravity-detector, but I was wrong. There's a setting to choose portrait or landscape mode, but it was preset to portrait, which locks the display orientation.

It has three settings: portrait, landscape, and "auto." However, it only affects the ebook reader, not the web browser or anything else. Everything else is stuck in portrait mode.

If you set it to "auto," then it'll adjust the eReader screen for any of three orientations: portrait (with buttons at the bottom), landscape with buttons at the left, and landscape with buttons at the right. If you set it to landscape, it's just like auto, except that it won't orient in portrait mode.

Landscape mode defaults to a MUCH bigger font than does portrait mode.

For landscape mode, you can hold it either way: with the mechanical buttons on the right, or turn it over so that the mechanical buttons are on the left. The left & right arrow buttons become page-up & page-down buttons, which is perfectly intuitive. But if you're holding it so that the buttons are on the right, then they point the wrong way! The arrow button at the end of the row ( ">" in portrait mode) points down ("V") if the buttons are on the left, which is right. But if you turn it over, so that the buttons are on the right, then that same button (which still takes you to the next page in an eBook) is pointing up ("^"), so you press the down-arrow to go up, and the up-arrow to go down.

While reading the section of the User Manual about how to look up a word in the Dictionary, I tried it out. That was about 7 minutes ago, and it still says "Searching..." Hmmm... the time in the upper-right corner is 7 minutes behind, too. It doesn't respond to the buttons or the power switch. Okay, it's been 14 minutes, clearly it crashed. Paperclip time!

After resetting the device with a paper clip (note: it doesn't reset until you remove the paperclip), it remembered what page I was on (p.58), so I tried again, and this time it looked up the word in about 1-2 seconds. Much better.

I wish it had a memo-taking app, and I wish it would work with an external USB keyboard, but apparently it won't.

It's not perfect, but, all-in-all, it's an amazing device for such a tiny price, much better than I really expected.

Does anyone know how I can backup the original firmware? I want to try a different firmware but I want to be able to go back to the original in case I don't like the one that I will try.

I looked at the pandigital site but they do not have the firmware that comes with these ereaders. I know how to backup the android ones but not this ereader.

So this can use pirated e-books/pdf's?

"This listing was ended by the seller because the item is no longer available."

Oh, here it is available again:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pandigita...0786546794

Here's another source for this device for $25 shipped:
http://www.bensoutlet.com/product...ital-novel