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The Archos 32 Android Device Review: A Good Tablet, A Better PMP

Intro

The Archos 32, a tablet? A pmp? Both? Check this out, go with me now, find out with me. What is it really, only time will tell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve5eqclpfgE&hd=1

Looks

A small screened device, pretty nice over all, form fitting and easy to hold, it is a sleek device. The colors really match and fit well. The screen and feel of it all look like Android and when it comes down to it.

Hardware

There is an ARM Cortex A8 at 800 MHz with DSP. A graphic accelerator: 3D OpenGL ES 2.0 is on board as well.

Screen

The screen is a 3.2 inch Touch screen, 400×240 pixels (WQVGA), 3.2” TFT LCD, 16 million colors, very nice.

Battery

The phone has a Music playback time of up to 24 hours, Video playback time of up to 6 hours and Web surfing of up to 8 hours. Good battery life and it does a good job, the music is as says, I have tested it and use it mostly as a PMP (personal music player)

Operating System

It has an OS similar to Android 2.2. It is nice, it works.

Software

It comes with Vanilla android and comes with deezer, Ebuddy, Mewbox, Raging Thunder Lite, Touiteur, Quickpedia all preloaded. It does not have Google Apps installed, it has app lib which is an app library, some apps can be side loaded and some can not, dropbox was one that wasn’t able to download direct or side load, where as other apps can be side loaded, one I tried was launcherpro beta, it works and works well. For some reason the notification bar would not pull down very well.

Key Board

The soft keyboard works ok, there is no hard keyboard. For some reason the sides of the keyboard were touchy, very touchy! It didn’t work as well, I installed another keyboard and it didn’t work very well either. It seems the sides are pretty bad and should be avoided if possible.

Web Browsing,  Camera and Video

The web works well if you have a strong wifi connection, the camera take nice pictures as well as HD video it seems. As a wifi tablet this is pretty nice, as a wifi device it is pretty nice. The camera works, I can see some major benefits of all this.

Call Quality

It is not a phone, no calls

Pros:

  • The wifi works
  • Headphone jack comes with this device

Cons:

  • The soft keyboard isn’t as accurate
  • The notification pulldown section is not accurate, very touchy
  • No Google Apps


Conclusions & Final Thoughts

Over all this is a nice pmp, not a very good tablet and I am unsure why Google Apps wasn’t included, that means no Google Market as well as other things that google offers, some things can be downloaded and some can be side loaded. It is disappointing in a lot of ways over a lot of things.

Other specs can be seen here