Archos G9 tablets available starting September 20th
Ah, Archos. Ever since I had the Archos 5 Android tablet a couple of years back I’ve stayed as far away from their products as possible. There’s something to be said for making cheap products, but Archos has a tendency to make products that shouldn’t even be given away for free. That might be changing though as Archos has finally realized that putting some more power into their tablets might solve that issue of things not working properly. The G9 series is exactly that, a new breed of Archos tablets that hopefully will be speedy enough to keep up with the rest.
Starting September 20th, the first pair of tablets will release. There will be a 8-inch version and a 10-inch version, with screen resolutions of 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 800 respectively. Storage will come in form of 8 or 16GB internal storage plus a microSDHC slot, or a 250GB hard drive. Yes, hard drive. One of those “keep magnets away” things that offer great storage space but not so great battery life, or space savings. I do hope they remember to put in a note about keeping those magnetic styli we see everywhere far away from he hard drive models. The tablets will run Honeycomb, and the CPU speed will be either 1Ghz or 1.5Ghz – both dual core, with the latter option being available in October. Full tech specs of the two tablets can be seen here and here. The prices starts at $299 and go to $469 depending on model and configuration.
While these tablets will have rather broad appeal with the CPU speed and software they’re running, both Archos’ reputation and the hard drive option will likely make these media tablets more than anything. 250GB of internal storage can be mighty useful on a trip, but seeing as how there are external hard drives out there that work with anything from an iPhone to a 10.1-inch Android tablet it’s not the killer feature that Archos wants it to be. Still it’s good to see them moving away from the cereal box products they’ve released over the last few years and onto something more feasible….hopefully.
[Archos via AnandTech]
