The French tech giant is breaking away from media players to unveil its third Android tablet in Paris next Thursday (with the UK event scheduled for June 28th), and the exciting news is it’s running Honeycomb.

All good, but what does it need to compete with the big boys? Well we can think of a few things…

1 A 7-inch screen

Tablets of this size are a completely different ball game to those around the 10-inch mark, as anyone who’s used the HTC Flyer will attest. It’s more like carrying round a notepad than a computer. (And you can fit two 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tabs on top of an iPad 2.) To date there aren’t many 7-inch Honeycomb tablets, just the Asus Eee Pad MeMo, and one from ViewSonic, so this would be a real in for Archos.

2 Multimedia format support

Archos is well known for how usable its devices are: they’ll play nice with pretty much any format you’ve got. Android, however, is not. If Archos can make its Android Honeycomb as format friendly as its media players, well, it could really start to dominate.

3 A low (or even reasonable) price tag

Naysayers writing off the original iPad balked at how expensive it was, but at the iPad 2 launch Steve Jobs pointed out that Apple’s competitors obviously didn’t think the price was too ridiculous. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer is the only Honeycomb tablet to be the same price or lower than the iPad 2, which is pretty crazy considering how much more usable Apple’s device is than most. Why would anyone pay more for a worse device?

4 A fast processor

Honeycomb supports tabbed browsing, so getting online with it is far closer to surfing on a proper PC or laptop. You’ll need a hefty processor to keep the speed up though, something around 1.2GHz should do the trick.

5 Ports aplenty

You’ll need plenty of connectivity to take advantage of the multi-format support: a mini HDMI for piping out HD movies to your TV, micro USB for plugging in other devices, microSD slot for loading on your holiday snaps. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 lacks HDMI or USB, so it seems an easy win for Archos.

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  • http://rayscomments.wordpress.com/ Ray

    “Why would anyone pay more for a worse device?”, simple, because buyers of the “worse devices” don’t agree with your biased statement.  The iPad is only better in some ways, and the Android devices are defitely also better in others.

  • http://ARMdevices.net/ Charbax

    Archos Gen9 has more than that. And Archos is number 2 worldwide top sold tablet after Apple, Archos certainly sold more Android tablets than Asus, Motorola, Samsung and other.

  • MarcusMarcus

    5. Only have micro usb for connecting to computers and for charging, give us a full size USB port for flash drives. Also a full size SD slot would be better than a micro sd slot in my opinion, especially if they can make it SDXC compatible.

    6. More RAM. At least 1GB of it. This should have more impact on tab browsing than the processor.7. faster internal flash than their gen 8s have

  • Anonymous

    With the exception of number 4, these things are already offered on their gen 8 devices (and they’ve already announced a 1.6ghz cpu for the gen 9 tablets so that takes care of number 4.) I don’t see why they’d take away all the features that have kept the gen 8s selling like hotcakes when they roll out their next generation tablets.

    Personally, I’d like to see “doesn’t force reboot when you put it to sleep with wifi on” in this list or maybe “Syncs Facebook contacts with your contact list like Android does perfectly on every device but the Archos gen 8s” THAT would be an improvement over their current line.

    Written from my Archos 70.

  • Jaypalces

    As an archos device it should support a large amount of memory like a 250gb model!

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