Archos’s Android 5 Tablet: It Isn’t a PC (or is It?)
By Harry McCracken | Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 3:39 pm
The French company Archos makes portable entertainment gadgets that often feel like a first rough draft of the future: For instance, it started making media players with big screens,video support, and TV output back when your average MP3 player was…an MP3 player. Today, it announced the Archos 5 Internet Tablet, an inventive gizmo that’s on the cutting edge of multiple trends: tablets, Android-powered devices, and PC-like devices that aren’t PCs in the traditional sense.
The 5 starts at $249.99 and sports a 4.8″ touch screen with 800 by 480 resolution, which means that it’s a bit too large to go in a pocket, but packs enough pixels to display typical Web pages with less need for zooming than on an iPhone or other more pocketable device. It’s available in versions with up to 32GB of flash memory, and chunkier hard-drive based ones with up to 500GB of disk space.
It runs Google’s Android–an operating system until now seen mostly on cell phones. Archos performed a fair amount of customization to the OS’s interface, resulting in something that is recognizably Android (it has widgets and a slide-out drawer of apps) but which has been reconfigured for a higher-resolution display. Archos has also launched its own software store, which it’s calling AppsLib; it’s debuting with only a handful of apps that have been customized for the 5, but the company says it’s going to work hard to ramp up the selection.
The existing Archos 5 app I’m most intrigued by is ThinkFree, the venerable office suite; combined with the 5’s support for Bluetooth keyboards and the HDMI output to a TV or monitor enabled by its optional dock, it opens up the possibility of treating the 5 pretty much like a desktop PC–then popping it out of the dock and taking it places where even a netbook would be too big and clunky. It also comes with the Twitdroid Twitter client, eBuddy for instant messaging, and a mapping app that uses high-res photos taken from helicopters.
The device includes 802.11 a/g/n Wi-Fi and GPS, but not 3G broadband (although Archos says that may come along eventually).The browser is based on the solid standard Android one; as Gizmodo’s Joanna Stern reports, it lacks Flash, but Archos is working on it.
Archos showed me the 5 in person last week, and it looked like typical Archos–a bit rough around the edges interfacewise, but bursting at the seams with interesting ideas aimed at early adopters. I wonder if it bears any resemblance at all to the Apple tablet we’re all assuming will show up sometime next year?
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Keep an Open Eye Eye, Sir » The First Successful Tablet? Says:
October 14th, 2009 at 10:22 am[…] vest and may indeed be able to make the system go nearly as fast as Windows XP. But will it match Google’s Android on the Archos 5 tablet for speed and utilty? Only the Shadow knows … var addthis_pub = 'jbsurveyer'; var […]
September 15th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
“it’s a bit too large to go in a pocket, but packs enough pixels to display typical Web pages with less need for zooming than on an iPhone or other more pocketable device.”
so it’s larger and less convenient than something that you can carry in your pocket? Well so is my laptop!
September 15th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
“so it’s larger and less convenient than something that you can carry in your pocket? Well so is my laptop!”
I’m not quite sure if you’re arguing for or against the Archos, but it’s very true that one of the several Great Unanswered Questions about tablets is whether very many people will want one, since our phones are going to have much of the same functionality and tablets aren’t going to replace laptops anytime soon. Archos probably has a bit more opportunity to be experimental here than a big company like Apple, since its meat-and-potatoes customers are early adopter types who’ll invest in multiple gadgets.
–Harry
September 15th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
You can easilly carry it in a pocket. I’ve been carrying my Archos 5 in my pocket everyday for over a year. Did you actually try to put it in your pocket before writing this as a fact?
It’s in fact about the same form factor as a wallet or as a passport. Do people complain because they cannot put their wallets or passports in their pockets?
September 15th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Also, Gizmodo’s Joanna Stern is wrong, it has Flash 9 support, it plays Youtube fine. But it won’t play sites like Hulu until Adobe releases Flash 10 for embedded ARM based devices in the next 2-3 months.
Hulu and some other such sites use ActionScript3 in newer than Flash version 9.0.28 of Flash 9 or Flash 10, it’s up to ADOBE TO FIX IT, because Flash is proprietary technology.
September 15th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
I wish we’d all just let Flash and Silverlight die. In vampire movie terms, drive a stake through them. This is the 21st century, guys, we should all be in HTML5. The legacy technologies are buggy CPU-suckers.
November 28th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Supposedly it crashed a ton when Attack of The Show (G4) was reviewing it
-the pry didn’t think to update the firmware
what does anybody know about their media club?