Abhinav Lal

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Posted on 02-03-2011

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French manufacturer Archos is best known for its portable media players, and has also been previewing and churning out low cost tablets since CES last year, with the Archos 7 Home Tablet making waves amongst others. It has now introduced three new inexpensive devices at CeBIT: a colour e-reader called Archos 7ob, and two Android tablets – the Archos Arnova 8 and Arnova 10.

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All these devices are supposedly priced at under Rs. 10,000, with the 8-inch Arnovo 8 to retail for $150, and the 10.1-inch Arnova 10 for $199 when they go on sale sometime in the next three weeks. While at first glance these inexpensive tablets seem too good to be true, not all is illusion – they do have the bare minimum required to do the job, and arguably fit the bill.

The Archos Arnova 10 runs Android 2.1, and has no announced update plan. It has a resistive touchscreen, a Rockchip RK2818 600MHz processor, and 8GB of internal storage (apart from microSD expandability). The Arnova 8 has a smaller resistive screen, the same processor, and 4GB of internal storage. Both tablets have no official access to the Android Market.

However, Archos does have its own app store, AppsLib, with over 10,000 apps. For those who just have to have Android Market onboard, there is no need to get too turned off the Arnova. The fan forum ArchosFans had already rescued previous Archos Android tablets from a Market-less fate, with their gApps4Archos.apk, software that will enable the Android Market to work when it is sideloaded onto the tablets. Check out a fan video introducing the latest low-cost Arnova tablets below: 

Archos has plans to launch a 10-inch capacitive touchscreen and 1GHz processor tablet for €199 in the near feature, as well as a smaller 7-inch model for €99.

The Archos 7ob colour e-reader will apparently retail for $175, and features a 7-inch resistive touchscreen with an 800x480 pixel resolution, 4GB of onboard memory and SDHC expandability. Apart from supported PDF and EPUB ebooks, the Archos 7ob also functions as a PMP and MID, with audio and video players, mini-USB port, as well as a web browser with Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n connectivity.