The growing world of e-book readers expanded again on Monday with the debut of a new device from Pandigital, a company previously best known for digital picture frames.
The one-gigabyte Novel isn’t breaking new ground, as the name suggests, but it’s offering a low-cost alternative to Barnes & Noble’s nook, Amazon.com’s Kindle, and Apple’s top-selling iPad.
The Novel Color Multimedia eReader sells at major retailers for $199, placing it on the low end of the e-reader price scale but more than the Kobo device unleashed two weeks ago by Borders, which sells for $149, and the lowest-priced Sony reader, the Pocket Edition, which sells for $140. The nook and Kindle each sell for $249, while the iPad, which offers many more features than e-reading, starts at $499, or $629 with 3G capability.
The Novel runs on the popular Android operating system, which Google has been pushing to have installed in everything from smartphones and TV sets to cars and even an iPad rival tablet computer. The Novel’s features include a seven-inch, 800×600 display and an ARM 11 processor, but it’s not 3G compatible and has no camera. Via Wi-Fi, Novel users can access Barnes & Noble’s inventory of one million e-book titles, half of which are free, as well as access Google’s growing Android Market.
Memory is expandable via a card slot, and later versions will include 2GB of storage and access to AT&T’s EDGE, a wireless technology that is somewhat slower than 3G but widely accessible in more than 13,000 cities and towns, according to AT&T.
Other features Pandigital is highlighting include a built-in dictionary and word search, a virtual keyboard, e-mail access and web browsing, music and video players, and, naturally, a photo viewer.
“The Novel device announcement seems to address some of the concerns raised with the addition of…