A lot of you have shown interest in the cheap tablets presented here on AllTouchTablet and one of the cheapest (without loosing on the specs front) is the Archos 7 Home Tablet, which we’ve presented in a few posts here and there.

    Now, that it will be available for customers to buy in a few days (preorder here), on May 17th to be precise, is time to write a comprehensive review based on all the info available and the published reviews from the ones that got the chance to play with the Archos 7 Home Tablet.

    Let’s start by looking at the list of quick specs of the Android powered Archos 7 Home Tablet.

    Specs

    • 800 x 480 pixels, 7” TFT LCD resistive touchscreen (no multi-touch)
    • Android 1.5 OS
    • 8 GB internal memory which can be extended with up to 32 GB micro SDHC cards
    • 600 MHz ARM CPU with 128 MB RAM
    • WiFi
    • Package: ARCHOS 7 home tablet, earphones, Standard USB cable (micro B/A), power adapter, user guide, legal and safety notice
    Archos 7 Home Tablet

    Archos 7 Home Tablet

    Now, let’s see what’s the purpose of Archos 7 Home Tablet by trying to identify the people who would buy it. Of course, it’s a device for those on a tight budget that want to take a (short) peak at what touch tablets are all about. It’s a device for media consumers, as Archos included support for various audio/video codecs, including HD: H.264, MPEG-4, Realvideo, avi, .mp4, .mkv, .mov and .flv plus MP3, WMA (non protected), WAV, APE, OGG, FLAC, AAC and photo codecs for JPEG, BMP, GIF. It’s a device capable of playing your media stored on the laptop or home computer with no problems. I expect Archos to offer further firmware upgrades that will bring this device up to date with popular codecs.

    Archos 7 Home Tablet is also capable of web browsing through the included Android browser (you can also install Skyfire and other browsers if you please), so expect a near perfect experience here, but we have to warn you that Flash videos, especially high resolution ones will play with dropped frames and audio sync issues.

    What’s god and bad about Archos 7 Home tablet

    The good

    • is cheap
    • build quality is very nice
    • plays videos rather nice
    • 4-5 hours of battery life during video playback
    • the build in kickstand means you don’t need any additional accessories

    The bad

    • only Android 1.5 for now
    • Flash videos play choppy with skipped frames and audio sync issues
    • no option for 3G data
    • resistive touchscreen is not multi touch and responds worse than a capacitive model (obviously)
    • CPU is slower than current 1GHz Snapdragon architecture
    • no support for Android Marketplace (but you have access to the Archos market place with up to 1000 apps right now)

    Those are the most important things to remember about the Archos 7 Home Tablet before making the decision to buy one or not. Personally I believe 200 $ is not that much for what you’re getting, but I would pay gladly 50-100$ more for a Snapdragon CPU, Android 2.1 and a capacitive screen. This would have made the Anchos 7 Home Tablet a near perfect device, but that doesn’t mean is not one of the best cheap tablets on market around. If you don’t like reading my ramblings about it here’s a video made by Engadget that shows in a few minutes what the tablet is capable of:

    And to top it off here are a few official pictures of the Archos 7 Home Tablet. Mind that the brushed aluminum case is not actually aluminum, but it feels sturdy enough to withstand quite a few drops on the carpet:

    If you’ve made up your mind about the Archos 7  Home Tablet you can get one from Amazon right now for 199$.

    When you get your hands on one don’t forget to leave a comment below so we all learn what you think.