The Archos 5 Internet Tablet was one of the first Google Android powered tablets (read: not a phone) to hit the market. While I was impressed with the low price and excellent multimedia capabilities in my recent review, I was a bit underwhelmed by the overall stability. Hopefully Archos has worked out some of the kinks, because the company has just announced that it’s bringing two new Android-powered tablets to market.
The Archos 7 Home Tablet looks like a larger version of the Archos 5. It features the same media playback capabilities and a similar design. But it has a 7 inch display instead of a 5 inch screen, which should make it a bit more of an iPad competitor than the almost-pocketable Archos 5 Internet tablet.
The Archos 8 is basically a photo frame that runs Google Android, meaning you can set it up to display photos but also tap the screen to bring up a web browser, weather forecast, recipes, or other information depending on your needs.
The Archos 7 is less than 0.5 inches thick and weighs just about 0.77 pounds. Archos says it will get about 7 hours of battery life while playing videos, and 44 hours during music playback. It will be available in Europe in April. A 2GB model will run 149 Euros ($203 US) while an 8GB model will cost 179 Euros ($244 US), making the Archos 7 slightly cheaper than the Archos 5.
The Archos 8 is also less than 0.5 inches thick, and weighs in at about 0.88 pounds. It will hit the streets in May for about 149 Euros with 4GB of storage.
On the down side, both tablets will have 600MHz ARM 9 processors, which means they’ll likely be a bit slower than the already-available Archos 5 Internet Tablet.
Update: The excitable charbax has posted a hands-on video, and while the tablet does appear to be a little slower than the Archos 5, the overall browsing and video playback experience seems pretty decent for the price. Video after the break.
Update 2: And it looks like Archos has added a new section to its web site for “Home Tablets”
via UMPC Portal
charbax is very entertaining in his videos – he’s so up beat. 🙂
“check this out!”
I have to say the price is pretty perfect for this.
I’ve often wondered why there haven’t been more lower speed/lower priced products out there. Everything seems to hover at the $300 level, keeping a lot of these things out of the realm of ‘take a chance/impulse buy’ (for me at least), this dipping into sub-$200 could make it a big winner.
Actually if that is an ARM 9 that’s probably a tad faster than the 800mhz ARM 8. Just moving from in-order to out of order execution should help the processor, and it has a shorter pipeline which should speed execution except in a few applications… Wow, this is actually good news. The processor was one of the things that was making me skeptical of the Archos 5. Hmm, this may require some digging.