IFA 2012: ARCHOS Debuts Console-Like GamePad Tablet with Android 4.0 ICS

ARCHOS has some experience on the Android market, which is why the company decided to take on a greater challenge and released a new type of tablet that combines heavy gaming and tablet features.

Dubbed GamePad, the newly announced tablet will be available for purchase beginning late October for only 150 EUR (190 USD).

As we already mentioned earlier, ARCHOS GamePad is aimed at gamers who need access to email, Internet, productivity apps and more, in addition to their favorite games.

The GamePad features a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen display, which makes it pocket-sizable and easy to carry around. Furthermore, the slate comes with physical control buttons and analog sticks.

On the inside, the device packs a powerful dual-core processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, which is complemented by a Mali 400-MP graphics processing unit featuring four cores.

According to ARCHOS, the GamePad includes an interesting technology, patented by the manufacturer, which allows for automatic game recognition and mapping to make sure every advanced Android game is compatible with these physical controls.

It is also worth mentioning that ARCHOS GamePad is powered by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system and is Google certified, which means users will have access to more than 600,000 apps and games via Google Play Store.

“When Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, was first released they included game controller support within the framework and that is when we decided to build the GamePad. Thanks to the mapping and automatic game recognition systems included on the GamePad, we already have over a thousand android games compatible with the ARCHOS GamePad's physical controls, including back catalog titles that originally didn't include physical controls,” said Henri Crohas, ARCHOS founder and CEO.

ARCHOS claims it approached a fair amount of major Android game developers in the past six months, in order to make their titles fully compatible with the GamePad. This means that potential customers should not worry they don’t have enough compatible games to play.