Archos 101

10.1’’ Connected Android™ tablet with capacitive multitouch screen

The ARCHOS 101 internet tablet is a tablet who’s choice you’ll be proud of. You’ll have in your hands the best of the highly desirable Android™ technology with a large, high-resolution 10.1’’ screen, a weight of 480 g, and a thinness of just 12 mm. Beyond containing your window into the Internet and your HD multimedia, your device is completely customizable with a world of apps to make it your personal tablet. 

The 101 has a capacitive 1024 x 768 touch-screen, a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor and a host of ports and radios normally associated with a netbook: HDMI, a microphone, a USB port, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a front-facing VGA webcam and accelerometers. It even has a kickstand.

As for size, it comes in slimmer and lighter than the iPad, at 12mm thick (the iPad is 13.4mm) and weighs 480 grams (the iPad weighs 680-grams). Best of all the features, though, is the price: $300 for the 8GB model and $350 for the 16GB. That’s $150 cheaper than the 16GB iPad (this comparison is apt as the 101 has no 3G option).

But it comes down to the software and battery life. We don’t have any reports on the power use, but apparently the scaled-up cellphone interface doesn’t work so well. Brad Linder at Lilliputing got his hands on the 101 and said that “thumb-typing in portrait mode is reasonably comfortable, I found text entry in landscape mode to be a bit awkward.” The 101 runs the latest version of Android, v2.2, which is theoretically capable of running Flash.

I wonder if, in the rush to get iPad rivals to market, the manufacturers are missing the point. Touch-screen tablets have been around for years, but it took a brand-new interface design and a big-ass battery before anyone actually started to buy them. And remember, it took Apple years to design it. Until the proper, purpose-built tablets (like HP’s expected WebOS tablets) finally appear, it looks like we’re getting the tablet PCs from the 1990s all over again, only with smaller cases and without Windows.