Update: Whoops. Looks like we fell for an April Fools’ joke.Â
French electronics company has been offering a line of Android tablets designed for gaming since 2012. The Archos GamePad line of products are basically 7 inch tablets with physical buttons on the sides of the touchscreen display which you can use to play games without covering the screen with your thumbs.
Now it looks like a 3rd-gen model is on the way.
The folks at French website Jbbm spotted a list of upcoming Archos products including phones, tablets, and something called the Archos GamePad3 Diamond 256 Go Full HD.
That long name gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect: a tablet with a 1920 x 1080 pixel (or higher) resolution display and 256GB of storage. It’s not clear if the device has solid state storage or a hard drive — Archos has been known to use both.
Throwing Diamond in the name also suggests that the new model could be related to the Archos 50 Diamond smartphone in some way… although I don’t know if that means it’ll take its design cues from that phone or if it means we should expect similar specs. The phone has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage.
When the first Archos GamePAd models started to ship a few years ago they were kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there weren’t many Android devices with physical buttons that provided tactile feedback for gamers. On the other hand, there also weren’t many Android games optimized for physical buttons, and the tablet had lackluster hardware.
These days there are devices like the NVIDIA Shield line of devices with physical gaming buttons as well as set-top-boxes like the Ouya, Mad Catz M.O.J.O. and upcoming Android TV devices such as the Razer Forge TV and NVIDIA Shield console which are designed for use with physical controllers. So there’s a growing number of Android games that should be able to work with an Archos Gamepad-style device.
via Notebook Italia
What a stupid April Fools joke. They could at least do their customers the courtesy of making the joke somewhat unbelievable.
Reading between the lines, I wonder if this is a sleezy way of gauging customer interest.
The joke came from Jbbm, not Archos.
Ah, fair enough
@brad it is jbmm not jbbm
Another joke https://www.jbmm.fr/2015/04/archos-lance-le-premier-smartphone-low-cost-de-luxe_1801
Oups Oups it is a joke for the first april …just for the gamepad 3 ! the rest of the list is real !
*sigh* This is why I try to stay off the internet on April 1st. But I didn’t see this until today.
Don’t feel bad, Brad. It’s not that far fetched a notion, especially from Archos. Pretty easy to fall for.
Is amazon dash button a real product?
Where’s the joke? just lying about something doesn’t make it a joke.