Archos has introduced the Arnova 9 G2, an Android Gingerbread tablet that packs the same 9.7-inch, 1024 x 768 IPS touchscreen display as Apple’s iPad, but is likely to be way cheaper.
Archos has unveiled the US prices for their upcoming G9 tablets, offering a number of spec choices to fit different budgets and spec needs. The G9 is split into two lines, the Archos 80 and the Archos 101, that are differentiated by their screen sizes, then each model comes with three more variants that come equipped by different processor speeds and storage sizes. But here’s the best part: all of them fall under $500.
A tablet for 99 bucks? Hell yeah. Given, the Archos Arnova 7 won’t be anyone’s first choice if you’re looking to get the full tablet experience, but for $99 you could do worse. A lot worse. In fact, the spec sheet isn’t bad at all for the price: the Arnova 7 sports a 7-inch, 800 x 480 touchscreen, and will run on Android 2.2 (Froyo).
Archos has announced that they’ll be unveiling their Generation 9 tablets on June 23rd at an event at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. While we can hardly understand the French teaser that they posted at the Archos Lounge, the image pretty much says it all. That blue bee? Android Honeycomb. That market bag the Android mascot is lugging? Android Market support. Besides this invite, Archos didn’t put out any images or specs of the devices to tease us more with, but if the company pushes through with the plans they outlined in a presentation back in March, the upcoming tablets are expected to rock a dual-core 1.6GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor and (possibly) 250GB hard drives to give them more storage without pushing the price up. That’s a huge performance and capacity update (at the cost of battery life), compared to the 1GHz tablets with up to 32GB of space available today – huge enough to make them something to watch out for, despite the lack of details.
It’s getting a little old after its introduction back in mid-2009, but if you’re looking for an affordable modern tablet that runs on Windows 7, the Archos 9 just got updated with a fresh spec to keep it up to date. With a faster 1.2GHz Intel Atom processor replacing the older 1.1GHz chip and a faster (and lighter, and more energy-efficient) 32GB SSD drive over the earlier version’s 60GB hard drive, it gets a performance boost that amounts to a high-end netbook at best, but if you ever wanted to run laptop applications on a compact slate, then this is something you might want to check out.
