Review Horizon

Archos 7 8GB Home Tablet found its way earlier than expected in Amazon stores. The Archos 7 Tablet is very light at 13.7 oz and it makes a good alternative to the more expensive iPad. It has some big advantages over iPad, the most important being the price and the openness of the Google Android OS, but some disadvantages as well ,as it lacks an accelerometer to detect the portrait/landscape transitions and its resistive touchscreen is much less responsive the the capacitive one that iPad has. However, if you just need a cheap eBook Reader or media player to travel with, the Archos 7 Home Tablet might be the perfect device.Check after the break for the picture gallery and full specs.

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Pandigital makes the jump from Photo Frames to a little 7″ e-Reader sporting Barnes & Noble bookstore capability built around Android OS. The little reader also has built Wi-Fi for web access, web browser as well as media player. It uses a  LCD screen instead of ePaper, 1GB internal memory and, a nice touch, SD/MMC slot (supporting 32GB cards).  The price at launch should be around $199. Supported eBook formats include PDF, ePub, HTML and the dimensions are: 5.5- x 7.5- x 0.5-inches. The weight is a meager 16 oz, baterry life about 6 hours, tilt sensor for portrait/landscape orientation so it looks like at least on the paper, everything looks pretty good.

Boot time: The recorded boot time is about 28 seconds from the time you push the power button, which suggests the firmware still has to improve.

Screen: The screen quality is decent in low light, but hardly readable outdoor. If reading books is the main activity for this device, you might need to look elsewhere, the display is not optimized for direct sunlight.

Touchscreen: The touchscreen is not very responsive, with the touchscreen slow to the touch.Also the behavior is sometimes erratic, with random page turns. This suggests that the device still needs several rounds of patches to reach a reasonable level of usability.

e-Reader: The e-Reader feature is basic, you can set the text size, but not the fonts/justifications. Page turning is also slower than e-ink based devices (Nook, Kindle) which should raise a red flag over the CPU speed.

Conclusion: Pandigital Novel is a cheap reader with basic features. Buy it if the price is the most important feature and if you do most of your reading indoors. SDHC card slot is a nice addition and allow an easy expansion.

Pandigital started to appear in various chains like Kohl’s and JCPenney, but at a price greater than MSRP. I would suggest to wait until they will be available in more stores…

Update: It looks like Kohl’s recalled the Pandigital readers to upgrade their firmware. Exactly as I explained, the firmware seemed to be really buggy (slowness, unresponsive, broken WiFi). However, you would expect an update to take place without taking the unit back in the year of grace 2010…

Check after the break for additional pictures and specs. Read More…

Barnes and Noble announced an upcoming service called PubIt!, set for Summer 2010 that will allow writers and publishers to publish their own books. Perfect if you are an independent publisher with not enough clout to go through the big guys. The service will convert your content to ePub format (and wrap it in DRM) and it should be available across multiple platforms.

Hit after the break for the press release. Read More…

The newly announced Kindle firmware update from Amazon brings the device in the realm of social media. The version 2.5 to be released next month includes Facebook and Twitter support. It will also (finally) include support for book collections and other goodies as zoom and pan for PDF documents and two larger font sizes. All in all, a nice set of free functionality added, we’ll see how all this will impact the already strained cellular network. Based on the initial previews, the Facebook support will be somewhat limited, allowing you to share interesting passages, but we’ll wait for the release date to take a better look.

1. Introduction

I mentioned in one of my previous posts that I am commuting to work by train and bus more than an hour and a half each way, every day. So I won’t get crazy listening to various meaningless discussions around me, or at people yelling their personal issues on their phones, I usually read or blog. For the reading part, sometimes I carry paper books with me, but I like to have more than one book at the time, depending of my mood: The answer to that is of course an eBook reader. Now, Amazon did a really good job with their Kindle and that would have been my first choice, however I want to surf on the Internet as well, so I looked around for a small Tablet PC that can do both tasks, and even some occasional movie watching.

I spent a couple of months watching various forums and I stumbled on some products from Viliv. For the Read More…