14 DAY TRIAL // That Archos would make a point of unveiling its own tablets is not really that big a surprise, but the company does seem to fancy larger storage capacities than most other makers of slates, as shown by its two new models.
These days have definitely been practically filled with announcements or rumors concerning the tablet market.
Of course, considering the coming of the Android 3.1 operating system and how Samsung, HP, ASUS and other now have tablets up for sale, this was to be expected. What most of these models have in common, among other things, is the storage capacity of 16 GB or 32 GB, though others go lower.
Either way, slates seem to favor NAND Flash storage, with microSD cards put in for extra flavor.
Archos distanced itself from this norm when it designed the 80 G9 and the 101 G9 slates. By simply using hard disk drives instead of solid state memory.
To be more specific, they have a HDD with a capacity of 250 GB, a Seagate Momentus Thin drive with a thickness of 7mm.
That said, both slates are based on a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, whose clock speed is of 1.5 GHz.
There is also an HDMI output (on both), useful when trying to stream over to a HDTV, what with 1,080p image and video quality being fully supported.
The 80 G9 and the 101 G9 have display sizes of 8 inches and 10 inches, respectively, and run the Android 3.1 operating system (Ice Cream Sandwich support might come a bit later).
Finally, what will probably be their greatest asset is that they are actually the cheapest tablets so far revealed, even though they haven't started to sell yet.
The 8-inch one has a tag of only $279, while the 10-inch G9 is priced at $349. In a land of models sticking around the $500 mark, this is quite the contrast.
UPDATE: Cleared up confusion regarding the name of the Android OS version.