Rather than competing against the iPad with a single, carefully crafted tablet, Archos is hoping one of its five new mobile devices will appeal to someone. The line ranges from 2.8 inches to 10.1 inches, though the smaller devices aren’t much competition.
The Archos 28 and 32 ($US100 and $US150 respectively) seem more like overpowered PMPs than tablet contenders – notable only for their 800Mhz processor. The next step up is the $US200, 1Ghz Archos 43, squishing 854×480 onto a crummy resistive touchscreen.
The final two units are where customers might become interested. The $US275 7-inch tablet includes a capacitive touchscreen running at 800×480, offers HDMI-out, MicroSD storage and can chew through formats like FLV and MKV. For $US25 more, you can step up to a 10.1-inch, 1024×600 model.
The entire series doesn’t have a terrible amount going for it, beyond Froyo out of the box and decent prices prices. But resistive screens on the smaller three pseudo-tablets, no Google apps and no access to the Android Market means we expect many will take a pass on Archos’ sampler. [Archos via CrunchGear]
Charbax
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 4:30 PMAll Archos Android devices support the full Google Marketplace without any problems. All you have to do is find the appropriate application .apk on http://forum.archosfans.com usually called “market4archos.apk” and transfer it to the device using USB and then simply click on it from the file browser and it asks you for your Google username and password to install the full Google Marketplace. It is as easy as installing Adobe Flash/PDF .exe file on a Windows PC. Do you say a Windows PC does not support PDF/Flash if that doesn’t come pre-installed for some licencing reason with Adobe?
The Google Marketplace is none other than a simple .apk Android application and Android is built in a way that it is not possible to block the installation of any .apk Android app. So there is no way for Google to prevent Archos Android tablet users from figuring out the way to install the full Google Marketplace on their devices.
Check here a video demonstrating how easy it is to install Google Marketplace with Gmail, Gmaps onto the Archos 5 Internet Tablet which was released 11 months ago: http://archosfans.com/2010/01/22/video-shows-you-how-to-install-the-google-marketplace-for-archos-hack-on-firmware-1-7-33/