First Budget Honeycomb Tablet - Archos Gen9 8" Tablet

Richard Fieldhouse (1 November 2011)

Here it is. OK, it only makes it passed our budget criterion of being under £200 by a margin of 1p at the time of writing, but it still is quite a milestone. Also it is only available for pre-order at the moment - with delivery currently promised for the end of next week.

Archos have been beavering away at the tablet market for years and it is really starting to pay off. This tablet does have what it takes to deliver the newer version of Android. While all the other budget tablets have the older Android platforms (2.2 Froyo or 2.3 Gingerbread) this new Gen9 comes with the latest version of Honeycomb - 3.2.

To make it into the budget Honeycomb zone, you have to choose the smaller 8Gb of Flash memory and the smaller 8" screen. But maybe that's not such a bad size after all. The screen resolution is the same as the iPad's at 1024x768. There's also a compromise on the RAM memory as it has only 512Mb - again the same as the iPad, but many of the other Honeycomb tablets have twice as much RAM (1Gb).

There's a "turbo" version promised for next year and there are quite a few more expensive options avaialble as part of this release including the much fancied 250Gb hard disk version .

You do get good video playback and HDMI output for your TV (although HDMI transfer of Macrovision®-protected contents is restricted). There's also GPS and a compass.

And you get the option (later) to buy a 3G dongle which fits into a cunning slot on the back.

And a kick-stand! What more could anyone want?