The e-book world is littered with plenty of options in this day and age, which is a far cry from what consumers had to put up with a few years ago. Heck, even e-book readers now support color for a more interactive experience, and hardware manufacturers are more adventurous now to venture into this particular niche market. Well, Pandigital’s STAR e-book reader has just gone through the paces at the FCC, where this 7″ device that sports a 800 x 480 resolution display will run on the Android operating system.
With a front-facing VGA camera, don’t expect to take snazzy images with that, but at least if your phone runs out of juice and you left your DSLR back home, perhaps this is a last ditch attempt to capture whatever you want to shoot digitally.
The hardware specifications clearly point it towards the mid-range segmet – after all, it has just 2GB of internal memory, but HDMI mirroring capability adds a feather in its cap. We would have liked to see Android 2.2 Froyo be replaced by Android 2.3 Gingerbread right out of the box, but right now all we can do is wait for a future software update. Good thing Barnes and Noble’s e-book store is supported so that you can get your digital reading fix.
It seems that the STAR will also be able to hook up to USB-compatible peripherals such as a mouse or a keyboard, clearly nudging the STAR towards tablet territory. We have no idea on pricing or availability as at press time though.
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