Tired of waiting for an affordable 8 inch Android tablet and don’t feel like buying a model from a Chinese company you’ve never heard of? It looks like Archos is about to launch an iPad mini-sized tablet with a relatively speedy processor and reasonably low price tag.
The Archos 80b Platinum is up for pre-order for about $200.
Sure, French tablet vendor Archos has a habit of simply slapping its name on Chinese tablets, (in this case it looks like the tablet was built by Yuanfeng Technology). But Archos unlike many Chinese tablets there’s actually a chance you might be able to walk into a store and try an Archos tablet before buying it.
On paper this model looks pretty decent. It appears to have a Rockchip RK3188 ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor with Mali-400 graphics, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage.
The Archos 80b has an 8 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth, a 2MP rear camera and a 0.3MP front-facing camera.
It has an IPS display, which means you’ll get wide viewing angles. And it has a capacitive touchscreen which means you’ll be able to perform multi-touch gestures with your fingers.
The tablet also has a microSD card slot, HDMI output, a mic and speaker.
It’s not exactly a high-end tablet, but the RK3188 is one of the fastest ARM Cortex-A9 chips around, and if you’re looking for something slightly larger than the Google Nexus 7 (albeit with a lower resolution display), you could probably do worse than the Archos 80b.
Archos introduced a similar tablet called the Archos 80 Platinum earlier this year. That model had an Allwinner A31 ARM Cortex-A7 quad-core processor with PowerVR SGX 544 graphics.
via Mike Cane
Have Archos yet sorted out their hideous chicken-wire touchscreen digitisers? Every time I’ve seen one of their tablets in a shop I’ve been put off right at the start.