Archos Announced New Tablets for the Platinum Family: 80b, 101, and 97b Platinum HD

Archos have been trying to gain more foothold in the Androidsphere. Until earlier this year, they concentrated solely on budget tablets and phones. When they released their Platinum line this year, they’re poised on taking on the higher end brands. A couple of days ago, they announced three new tablets for the line.

Archos 80b Platinum

The ARCHOS 80b Platinum is the entry-level tablet, sporting an 8-inch, 1024 x 768 IPS screen, 1GB of RAM and a 0.3MP front and 2MP back camera. The other two are shooting for high end status, with the ARCHOS 97b Platinum HD sporting a 9.7″ IPS screen with a high resolution double that of the 80b at 2048 x 1536 (similar to Apple’s Retina display resolution) and both back and front cameras are 2MP; the ARCHOS 101 Platinum having a lower resolution of 1280 x 800 but a larger screen real estate at 10.1. Its cameras are also similar to the 80b at 0.3MP and 2MP front and back, respectively. Both high end models sport 2GB of RAM.

Archos 101 Platinum

All three sport the same amount of internal storage at 8GB, and all three are expandable via microSD card. They all come with dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth, though the 101 has the added bonus of GPS support. They also all share the same A9 ARM Cortex Quad-core 1.6GHz CPU and Android 4.2 Jellybean right out of the box. As is the tradition of ARCHOS products, they come at relatively affordable price: the 80b, 101, and 97b will be arriving this October at USD 199, 269, and 299, respectively. That’s roughly PHP 8,615, 11,645, and 12,944.

Those price ranges put them in direct competition with the Nexus 7 (USD 229 for the 16GB model, USD 269 for the 32GB one), which is the current King of Bang For the Buck Tablets (or arguably, Android tablets in general). Yes, these ARCHOS tablets win out in screen size (and in the world case of the 97b, screen resolution) and microSD support, but the Nexus line trumps them in everything else, such as added connectivity like NFC, at least twice the internal storage, and the fact that you’re assured of timely updates directly from Google.

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Archos 97b Platinum HD

Still, it’s nice to see other manufacturers stepping up to provide us with tablets and phones that have high end specs but aren’t out to break our banks. This is especially true with more well known companies who seem to pricing their products sky high (I’m looking at YOU, Samsung!).

[Sources: Archos]

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