Looking for an iPad competitor? Archos 9 PC Tablet certainly looks like an iPad competitor to an extent but its touch controls are highly annoying.
Review
The best thing Archos is known for is its portable media player; its Android powered Archos 5 Internet tablet. The Archos 9 PC Tablet is a 9 inches PC product and it has Windows 7 OS. The fusion of a general Netbook laptop and a media player is what the Archos 9 PC Tablet is, with a price that attracts potential buyers.
Its body is sleek and thin and this makes it what a tablet device should be. The screen rotation is terrible; the screen orientation is horizontal whereas functioning is comfortable when held vertically and this is why one would need a screen rotation button to adjust it. The Archos 9 PC Tablet satisfies both the need of a Windows PC and a multimedia device partly. It has a reliable and solid construction with a thin design and ample storage capacity. The CPU contains 1.1 GHz Intel Atom Z510, which turns out to be rather lethargic and frustrating.
The touch screen is 8.9 inches resistive and is reported to be very slow in responding. It has a stylus attached to it and an onscreen keyboard that turns out to require very firm fingers to use it. The touch screen was expected to be much more responsive, but it is not. The touch screen requires a very heavy hand to operate it, and does not respond instantly as in other good capacity screens. One cannot easily drag and let go the selections on the screen, flip pages or scroll down pages. However, by using the PC version of Amazon’s Kindle software, e-book files were displayed much nicely. On clicking the far end of the screen, pages can be turned over, the display could be rotated to portrait mode but again swiping was not allowed to turn the pages.
This device gives a feel of an enormous media player when held in both hands and offers a great view of documents, files, web pages and photos but when the requirement for a keyboard arises, the onscreen keyboard functions awkwardly and this deprives users of one of the most basic computing requirement. Hitting the keyboard keys that are gripping the device, with a far off hand position, it becomes difficult and uncomfortable to use the keyboard. However, the good thing is that this device offers its own version of Window’s onscreen keyboard which is very comfortable to use, with easily hittable keys.
The display of the screen is 10.1 inches wide and it offers a 1,024×600 pixels native resolution; a standard for many Netbooks. At a price of $549, the Archos 9 PC Tablet disappoints users to an extent as it does not fulfill many basic operations and is not worthy of being that expensive. A more responsive touch screen and a speedy processor, the Archos 9 PC Tablet would have not disappointed buyers. Archos is known for its generally well-received portable media players, such as the Android-powered Archos 5 Internet tablet. The company’s 9-inch PC product, called the Archos 9 PC Tablet, features a full Windows 7 OS in an effort to meld the media player and Netbook laptop into one attractively priced fusion device. Unfortunately, nailing that recipe is apparently tougher than it looks, and the final result fully satisfies neither as a Windows PC nor as a handheld multimedia device. The most crippling design decision may be the choice of the 1.1GHz Intel Atom Z510 as the CPU. Though … Expand full review
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