I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I was sold an "android tablet" that turned about to be one of these less-than-stellar Pandigital E-Readers. He doesn't want to give me even a partial refund, however Pennsylvania has extensive commerce laws which if I'm not mistaken do protect some of my rights as a consumer, including an implied warranty. I believe my best defense here would be that in his ad and in the emails sent to me, he stated that the device could download apps from the Android Marketplace(which I just checked, he did reference by name) which it cannot(meaning he lied about the product). Another complaint of mine, although not as strong an argument, is that he listed it as having "1 GB Internal Memory" which is ambiguous as that could refer to either RAM or Flash memory(as it turns out it has "shared memory", which is the worst of both worlds). I have his name and phone number, which means it would be trivial to issue a court summons if I had to(and the threat of this and resulting legal fees should be more than enough to get a partial refund).

That said, I would be willing to let this go and hold onto the tablet, if I could run my own selection of out-of-market apps on it(which the ad implied I could do). Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to do that. I have attempted to use side-load wonder machine to side-load selected apks to the device, however it never detects it(after installing the obscure adb driver it needed). After that I tried downloading the apk files off the net using its web browser(and my email), which also failed, this time throwing errors when either parsing or installing the apk(it did this with multiple apks). So the question is, is there anything I missed/any other way to attempt to install apps on this(I've been told rooted firmware would work, but I'm hesitant to try that) or should I pressure the dubious seller for a refund and save my money for something else?

edit- just realized I screwed up the title. Fixed.

What version of Android does it have? What sort of specifications? How much did you pay for it?

Android 2.1

ARM11 Processor
1GB "shared memory"(he said 1 GB memory in his ad)
7" screen, 800x600 resolution

I paid $140 but I would only need to get $100 back for a refund to satisfy me.

It's not upgradeable to any other version of Android too, it's stuck on 2.1.

Well, I would say you return it, it seems that even if you can hack it for the market place and whatnot, I don't think 1 GB would get you very far, you could probably get an archos tablet for roughly the same price, if not an extra 30 or so dollars. (hinting at Archos, at any rate)

also, I don't know if this would help, but searching around brought me to this:

http://androidforums.com/pandigital-novel-7/

@comic- all the apps I'm interested in running will run on 2.1(mainly ScummVM and Firefox).
@qazz22- the amount of storage is irrelevant, as I have a metric s**t-ton of SD cards(my dad's a photographer). I have a 4 gig in there right now which will hold everything I want. That link you posted might help, I'll give it a shot.

Ah, I didn't know it had an SD card slot, my bad. (my 8GB archos has no SD card slod >.>)

I would still try to refund it and get a better tablet, perhaps

Ahh, a tablet just like my brother's! His tablet is about 700MHz with maybe 256MB of RAM, and it is awful. Well, he hates it, I think it's fun to try to work with and get it to do cool things (Firefox included). If I were in your place, I'd keep it. I don't feel it would be neccessary, or even worth it, to threaten the guy to get $100 back, when you can make a usable device without doing that. Try to find a nice website that has lots of APKs to download (Android Freeware comes to mind. I think that's the one I used on my brother's tablet). Once you have that, you can start grabbing apps from there (They'll have the basic apps: the (in)famous Angry Birds, Tetris, Snake, some utilities, etc). Also, the reason for it rejecting the apps, I think, is because of the Android version. Since we are at a higher version right now, then most apps have been updated, and that includes all the APKs that you could find online. Try including "inurl:apk 2.1 <app name>" in your search, and if that doesn't find anything, remove the inurl: part.

Not all Android devices allow side-loading, which is installing applications from a third-party source. DShiznit's device doesn't seem to allow sideloading.

Personally, I would return it and use the money to buy something more useful, like a Raspberry Pi.

I thought that that was built directly into the Android OS? I didn't think that people could just remove that..

Isn't Android open source, thus enabling developers for handhelds/tablets remove and add things at their discretion?

It sounds like you are under the impression that the memory is shared between storage and RAM - it isn't. There is no such thing as shared like that. If I had to guess I'd say it has 256 or 512mb of RAM, and 1GB of storage (divided between system and user, though, so that doesn't mean there is 1GB of *free space*)

You could try demanding a refund, saying that he lied about the product. If he refuses you could take him to small claims court.

Or pop over to xda-developers and see if anyone has hacked on it, but it's not a good tablet in the first place, so....



Of course it can be removed, Android is open source. Anything can be added or removed or changed.

I was going to guess it was 1GB of RAM shared between CPU RAM and GPU RAM, but that makes sense too, come to think of it.

Thanks for clearing that up. That makes more sense actually. I still contend his wording was ambiguous on this.


That was going be my idea from the start if I couldn't make this work, although I'm sure he'll cave before I'd need to actually take him to court(He'd have a choice between losing some money, and possibly losing a lot more money).

My brother gave his wife a Pandigital tablet for Christmas and when I saw it I thought it looked and handled really nice...but the darn thing wouldn't connect to a router 20 feet away. I don't know the exact model but I've been soured on Pandigital products for the present.

If you can return it, I would and save the money towards a nicer real computer =) You didn't say where you bought it, but in many cases sellers can be pressured with the threat of negative feedback on their online storefront which would disincline other users from purchasing from them, even before you resort to legal threats. Similarly, if you paid through PayPal, you can open a dispute, at which point the seller can either do it nicely, or you can escalate it to a claim at which point PayPal will investigate the case and take the funds from his account by force if necessary.

If I recall, he purchased it off Craigslist.

He could still be in luck if he made the financial transaction through Paypal, otherwise legal threats may indeed be the best recourse.

I haven't been in any CL transactions using PayPal, it's been purely cash in my experience. But there are likely transactions going on through PayPal, I guess I never bought anything expensive enough to not be able to use cash. Haha.

My parents weren't feeling the idea of threatening legal recourse(it was going to be a calculated bluff at any rate) and too much time has likely passed anyway. I'm gonna try flashing the 2.2 OS that's available for the this on Slatedroid and hope for the best.