The Archos 7 Home Tablet is very carefully named. That “home” part is Archos’ attempt to distinguish the affordable Android offering from a rather more famous slate. At £129.99 compared to £429 for the cheapest iPad, the Archos 7 Home Tablet looks like a bargain but do its skills really deliver a good deal? Find out in our Archos 7 Home Tablet review.
Read the rest of our Archos 7 Home Tablet review
Archos 7 Home Tablet review: Screen and build
Archos 7 Home Tablet review: Android and media skills
While the iPad goes out wandering into the world, the Archos 7 Home Tablet is more content to sit on your bedside table or on top of your kitchen cabinet like the O2 Joggler. It’s solidly built with a mainly plastic body and a brushed aluminium back that adds a touch of class.
Designed to browse the web, run apps, act as a ebook reader and a media player, the Archos 7 Home Tablet has big ambitions. But it also has two big drawbacks: a resistive touchscreen and its OS – a rather rickety version of Android 1.5. The Archos 7 Home Tablet’s resistive touchscreen is particularly troublesome now we’re used to super-responsive capacitive panels popping up across the gadget spectrum from the iPad down to affordable Android phones like the HTC Wildfire. The Archos 7 Home Tablet screen just isn’t very responsive and needs serious prodding to get going.
Once you get used to tackling the truculent touchscreen, you then have to get used to the wobbly version of Android 1.5 running on the Archos 7 Home Tablet. It can do multitasking but it isn’t all that stable. The browser has a tendency to crash and it won’t handle YouTube videos, much less BBC iPlayer streaming.
Restrictions slapped on Archos by Google also mean the Archos 7 Home Tablet can’t access the Android Market. That means you need to scour the web for apps yourself or rely on the Archos AppsLib Store which is very sparsely stocked and doesn’t include popular items like newer Twitter apps. It’s a shame it’s so tricky to get hold of apps with a copious 8GB of storage (expandable to 32GB via micro-SD card, though not for apps) going begging.
Where the Archos 7 Home Tablet does distinguish itself is video playback. It opened and played MKV files with ease and gobbled up AVI clips which Android doesn’t usually natively support. Video playback looks great on the seven inch 840 x 480 screen but the trumpeted ability to play HD video is not that useful with only composite video out and WVGA resolution.
With music files, the Archos 7 Home Tablet is similarly accommodating. There’s support for MP3, AAC and the higher quality FLAC and APE formats. The built-in speakers are decent – we could hear them from the other end of a reasonably sized basement flat – but it’s hard to discern an audible difference when you play high quality samples. Similarly, as with most ear buds bundled with gadgets, the Archos 7 Home Tablet’s earphones don’t cut the mustard.
The poor responsiveness of the Archos 7 Home Tablet’s screen does have an effect on its otherwise excellent music and video skills. The user interface in the music app is basic but becomes frustrating because it’s hard to quickly dive in and skip tracks or pause playback. Physical controls for music and video would have been a good addition.
The Archos 7 Home Tablet does pack a lot of features in for the price but the restrictions of its rapidly aging incarnation of the Android OS and the unresponsiveness of its screen seriously hamper its usefulness. If you want a media player with internet smarts to use around your house, it is cheaper than an iPod touch and does have the advantage of a larger screen. But with more powerful Android tablets like the Dell Streak already here, being restricted to a limited number of apps could get irritating fast.
Read the rest of our Archos 7 Home Tablet review
Archos 7 Home Tablet review: Screen and build
Archos 7 Home Tablet review: Android and media skills
