The Archos 9 tablet, which we’ve presented a few times here at All Touch Tablet.com is one of the great examples on how you can ruin a perfectly good idea with bad engineering. So, let’s see the basic idea and dissect it: build a slim slate type tablet, running a fully fledged Operating System that can run a few hours with WiFi on. All simple at this point. Let’s now see what went wrong.

    First to build a slim device you need a small battery, so you need a low power CPU which is always slow, no matter how you look at it. Add Windows 7 Starter to this equation and you got very slow experience overall, not to mention shuttering HD playback. Now, it would all be acceptable it the touch screen was really good (think iPhone good), but it’s now the case: you really have to push your finger on the screen for it to register something (damn with those resistive models). Oh, and you can’t drag anything on the screen, so no scrolling on long web pages or in documents.

    Archos 9 button layout

    Archos 9 button layout

    And that’s not all, the virtual on screen keyboard is bad, very bad so you can’t really type with two hands as the 8.9 inch diagonal screen is too big for you to reach the letters in the middle. There’s also no dedicated button for screen rotation, something that adds at least 3-4 clicks to get it done via Windows 7 interface.

    Unfortunately the Archos 9 could have been a fine device, but is not really worth the 550$ asked price, unless you really need a tablet running a fully fledged OS where you could install your favorite apps. See a CNET video review below: