Archos is a French company that used to be well known for portable media players and over the years has evolved to build tablets, netbooks, and so on. With an announcement coming shortly after Google I/O where the Nexus 7, a quad core 7 inch tablet priced at $199 was announced, the company revealed their new 9.7 inch tablet, the 97 Carbon.
The tablet is part of Archos’ entry-level line “ELEMENTS” which also features a 7 and 8 inch version. Here’s the specs and what we know so far…
- 9.7 inch display running at 1024×768
- 1GHZ ARM Cortex A8 processor
- 1GB RAM
- 16GB internal storage with microSD card support up to 32GB.
- 2 megapixel rear-facing camera
- 0.3 megapixel (VGA) front-facing camera
- Wifi only
- 1080p video output through HDMI port
- Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
The price? $249. The processor is rather outdated, a single core which you can find in phones and tablets two years old. While a 9.7 inch screen may work better for some, one can’t help but wonder why you would spend $50 more for something that is a fraction of the power of the latest Nexus 7 tablet.
In comparison, the Nexus 7 has a display running at 1280×800, 1.3GHz NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor, 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera, and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Not to mention the 16GB version costs $249, the exact same price as the Carbon 97. It just seems that Archos will have a hard time selling this tablet considering the other more powerful and similarly priced options already on the market.
Now, if they could have installed a better screen and a dual-core processor at the same price point, that might have made it a deal breaker.