We could soon see more newspaper publishers offering Android tablets to digital news subscribers. TigerDirect and Archos rolled out a new program called PubTab this week that will allow publishers to customize the software on an inexpensive 10 inch Android tablet that can be bundled with a subscription package.
If that all sounds kind of familiar, it’s because this is the program that launched this month in Philadelphia. A pilot program is being run by Philadelphia Media Network, allowing customers to pick up an Archos 10 G2 tablet for as little as $99 when they sign up for subscriptions to three digital news applications.
The Archos 10 G2 features a 1024 x 600 pixel capacitive touchscreen display and a 1 GHz single core processor. It runs Google Android 2.3 Gingerbread, has a camera and 4GB of storage. It recently went on sale for $200, so you the Philadelphia newspaper version is about half price for subscribers.
Out of the box, the tablet doesn’t include the Google Android Market, run the latest tablet-optimized version of Android, or have the fastest processor around. But it’s pretty cheap as a $200 tablet.. and even cheaper if you bundle it with a newspaper subscription — assuming you were planning on spending money on a newspaper anyway.
It would be nice to see TigerDirect sign up a few other partners to provide customized tablets with better software, better build quality, or better specifications. But for now it looks like this is a TigerDirect/Archos collaboration, and I suspect that means we’ll soon see the Arnova 10 G2 tablet pop up in other newspaper circulation areas soon.
As you know the Arnova 10 G2 can easily run the full Google Marketplace, will have the latest tablet optimized Ice Cream Sandwich firmware update in a month or two and its processor is faster than those in the Archos Gen8, Ipad1 or Samsung Galaxy Tab 7, so it’s not too slow especially once running Ice Cream Sandwich.
For people interested in those newspaper subscriptions, they basically get a free tablet for extending their subscription for 2 years at the same $15/month rate that they’d pay for the newspaper subscription anyway.
If they want to also promote the latest Dual-core Honeycomb specs, they can also sell the Archos G9 for $199 on the same 2-year newspaper subscription instead of those $99 for the Single-core Gingerbread.
I take it when you say something can easily run the Google Market place, you aren’t saying that the hack to so is yet available? I am monitoring the arctablet blog for the hack.
I got my tablet yesterday. While the viewing angles are noticeably worse than with my HP Touchpad, that was expected. I wasn’t expecting a full USB 2.0 port, so that was a surprise, and it does allow me to access the files on the flash drives I tested. Still, there are some bugs, since I can’t exchange the flash drive with another unless I reboot the system.
You don’t get the option to unmount the flash drive for removal?
Yeah I do. But then when I reinsert the flash drive it prompts me again that I can remove the flash drive. In any case, I have determined that the problem is unique only one of my Kingston flash drives.