ARCHOS 101 Internet Tablet 8GB For Sale

First off I’m not new to Archos. I first bought their gen 5 device that made other personal media players look silly and had wifi and a touch screen. Each new generation impressed me. Last year I bought the first Android tablet I ever saw, the gen 7 Archos 5 IT. It was launched in Oct 2009 with a lot of flaws, but was a compelling device. By early 2010 it had become stable and very impressive but I always wanted a bigger screen. I bought their gen 8 7 inch A70 and the 10.1 inch A101 as soon as they were available on the Archos web site. I wanted to buy on Amazon but the demand for these tablets has been so intense they have been selling out every shipment in hours or days.

Before I get to the good and bad let me address some comments here. It is important to realize with technology that your experience may or may not be the norm. Some people said they have trouble with wifi. I have had this on my home system with 35 Mbps Fios and WPA2, my Clear WiMax with WEP and my Rooted Vibrant mobile AP with WPA2. It is brilliant at finding, locking and holding signal and can find signal farther than other devices. Having said that Archos recently acknowledged a problem with WPA AES they are working on with the chip set manufacturer. Also the touch screen is very sensitive, some have said more so then their phone. Now for the bad…

The screen has to be the worst thing, and at that nobody I have showed it to has complained. Unlike my A70 which has excellent viewing angles the A101 I received not only has limited angles but it seems to favor being tipped away from me and gets bad from straight on in landscape mode. It also has a lot of glare under lights. I’m going to get an anti glare screen protector. There is also a cross hatch pattern visible when it is off and black. This is the first Archos product I considered exchanging, but oddly enough once I started using it I didn’t seem to notice. In use it is bright and sharp. Showing it to people nobody said anything about viewing angles or screen problems. I frequent archosfans forum and I’m not confident my viewing angle observations are universal to all A101 tablets. Ironically before updating my A70 was not as crisp as my A101 as far as lag. Keep in mind my phone is blazingly fast. The Froyo update made things faster but some people noted it was under clocked at 800 Mhz, though performance is the same or better. I used Z4Root to temporarily root and another program to set the CPU max back to 1 GHz and it is quite smooth. Additionally Flash on the Froyo release is less than perfect but Archos announced they are waiting for their agreement with Adobe to be finalized to release their authorized Flash that is hardware optimized. If you’re not a geek that means once the legal contracts are in order instead of using the central processor for intense calculations it passes it off to the graphics processor which can handle it with less work and frees up everything else at the same time. The net result should be much nicer and smoother.

Now for the good. First off Archos is known for buggy initial releases that get a lot better with a few of their continued updates. Several months in with their last tablet they released hardware graphics drivers that netted the tablet among the very best scores of any Android device for graphics. This release has been good and should get even better. Still it helps if you are willing to putter around a bit, install the market hack and go to archosfans.com if you have a problem. Archos has decent support, but the community support is awesome. The new media players are excellent. Other Android devices are left wanting but Archos has been working on the core media player for 10 years and it shows with a wide variety of codecs handled flawlessly. Archos also performs to the battery specs they list. For this tablet you can play with it all day long, browse the web and watch videos and not have to charge until late. Charging is very fast with the AC adapter.

The best part of this device is the huge screen real estate for a tablet and how responsive it is. The built in stereo speakers are surprisingly good, full and loud. The kick stand is great. What really gets impressive though is what it can do extra. Yes, you can add memory with Micro SD. You can also play media over UPnP and SMB. Beyond that you have a full size USB host plug. Take your nice high end camera, take some pictures and plug it in to your A101 to download and see it in big screen glory, or grab a 500 GB drive and take your entire media collection with you. Get a micro HDMI cable and you can not only play movies out to your TV but your entire experience moves to the TV with the Archos becoming a touch pad. Get a game control or Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, even a USB controller. You can browse the web in 720p on your big screen from the couch or do a slide show or whatever for friends.

I had the A70 in my booth at a holiday show and a lady asked about it as I was recording sales over wifi and said she had an iPad. I asked her to give me an opinion of my A101. She was interested and I handed it to her and she was amazed how light it was. It is actually 20% smaller and 30% lighter as well as thinner and 16×9 instead of 4×3… even though the iPad has a smaller screen technically at 9.7 inches. She didn’t see a problem with how the screen looked, though the iPad has a nicer screen. However when she saw the connectivity options and expandability she immediately asked where she could get one. She had the look of someone who had spent too much money for too many limitations.

Tablets are hot items. Once you try one you will realize that you may not drag your laptop around the house but you will with a tablet. Other companies will produce more impressive hardware lists or do one thing or another better, but the people who have bought some of the new dream spec sheet units are also on the Archos forum and resigned to the fact that the experience Archos has means they have the more polished user experience. Additionally while some new start up may or may not support the device and provide updates Archos has updated my devices regularly for the opening months and has released updates at over a year after launch on the last 3 generations of devices. Archos listens to customers better than one might imagine for a little French company and they know how to make compelling devices.

I close with this. After ditching my BlackBerry for a Galaxy S variant (Samsung Vibrant) I thought I would move away from Archos for the Galaxy Tab. While it is an impressive device it is too expensive, and I also heard the rounded back made it slide off things too easy. I realized I could get two Archos tablets for that price, a 7 and a 10, so I did. Last year I paid $370 each for 32 GB 5 inch tablets. This year I paid $275 and $300. Next year I expect these tablets to be working just fine, but being a gadget whore I know Archos will have a new Eagle quad core tablet running Honeycomb and I will just have to buy it. My A101 will not be seeing as much love and won’t be worth selling, but might make an awesome gift to someone who has been lusting after it. The important point is I won’t be paying $25-$40 a month for a $600 device on 2 year contract consumed with lust and remorse. I will plop down $250-$350 for the new one.

If you can find this in stock get it and enjoy!