Archos planning Android powered Internet Media Tablet

Posted by Al Warmington on Tue 10 Feb 2009

With a 5" screen, is it really pocket-sized?

Archos creates some of the finest personal media player devices on the planet, but with smartphones steadily gaining greater multimedia capabilities, the future of standalone devices seems uncertain. Luckily, Archos has a plan – to beat smartphone makers at their own game with an Android powered Internet Media Tablet.

The idea is still at the planning stages, but Archos already has a good outline of what its new Internet Media Tablet will do. For starters, it will offer all the telephonic abilities that Google’s Android platform brings to the table. So it will act as a smartphone, allowing voice communications and data browsing using 3.5G HSPA connectivity, and will let you run other Android applications downloaded from the Android Marketplace.

Then you’ve got all the usual multimedia capabilities that you expect from Archos: music and video playback (supporting multiple formats), Adobe Flash and Flash Video, and TV recording. This will be backed up by a phenomenal 500GB of storage space – not unusual in the PMP market but completely unheard of for a smartphone.

To ensure that all these media capabilities are uncompromised by the fact it’s a portable device, Archos’ new Internet Media Tablet will boast a massive 5” screen. That would be another big step for smartphones, but one that we feel might significantly detract from its use as a mobile phone. We were already wondering if the newly unveiled Toshiba TG01, with its 4.1” touchscreen, might be going a little far. A 5” device would make that look tiny by comparison.

Archos does promise that it will still be practical. The gadget will only be 10mm thick, so portability shouldn’t be too much of an issue, even if you’ll look like a dork holding it to your head. And there are other benefits too: the new Internet Media Tablet will pack an OMAP3440 processor based on the ARM Cortex-A8 superscalar microprocessor to give “laptop-like performance”, as well as packing a battery big enough for seven hours of video playback.

Prices and availability are still up in the air – we don’t even have a proper picture to show you yet, but we’d guess that it won’t look too different to Archos’ current 5” Archos 5 PMP (pictured).

Link: Archos

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