Archos 101 G9 Turbo ICS review

Tablets with the glamour of Apple’s new iPad or Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.7 will set anyone’s credit card twitching, but the quality of more affordable alternatives is steadily rising. The Archos 101 G9 Turbo ICS is a prime example. It’s a 10.1in tablet with the latest “Ice Cream Sandwich” version of the Android OS on seriously quick hardware, but only costs a tempting £280.

Scan down the specifications, and the 101 G9 Turbo looks an absolute steal. OMAP’s fourth-generation 4460 system-on-a-chip takes centre stage, combining a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU with PowerVR SGX540 graphics. It’s the next model up from the chip that powered the BlackBerry PlayBook and Amazon Kindle Fire, so on paper it’s no slouch.

Archos sent us the 16GB model – we’re not tempted by the 8GB version for only £20 less – but in a departure from the flash-storage norm, there’s also a 250GB HDD model for £300. Whichever you choose, the core components are the same.

The chassis has some nice design touches. Rather than provide a dedicated 3G version of the tablet, Archos offers a separate 3G dongle (£35 from Amazon). Remove the blanking plate hiding the USB port on the tablet’s underside, and the 3G dongle slots in to rest flush with the 101 G9 Turbo’s body. Another neat, if simple, idea is the integrated stand, which holds the tablet upright for watching movies. Around the sides you’ll also find a mini-HDMI port, a microSD slot (which supports up to 16GB cards) and a micro-USB port for charging the device’s lithium polymer battery.

With the ARM CPU running at 1.5GHz, the Archos has plenty of power to meet the demands of Ice Cream Sandwich. Apart from an annoying tendency for the lock screen not to respond when first switched on, it’s surprisingly nippy in use. Demanding games such as Shadowrun and Reckless Racing ran smoothly, and the fluidity of the updated OS really shines.

Put through our usual suite of benchmarks, the OMAP hardware demonstrates its prowess. It scored 2770 in the Quadrant benchmark, and finished the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 1,603ms. That’s significantly quicker than any of the Tegra 2-powered Android tablets we’ve seen. It even edges ahead of the Tegra 3-powered Asus Transformer Prime, although we tested that using Honeycomb, so the results aren’t directly comparable.

It’s an impressive performance, but that may not be enough to mask the built-to-a-budget chassis. The rounded plastic body feels cheap, and the grey speckled finish hardly sets the pulse racing. It’s a smidgen under 13mm thick and weighs 649g, so there’s no real excitement here either. Build quality feels somewhat iffy, too: gripping it by the ends, the whole thing bends too easily, and it takes only a little pressure on the rear to show through on the display on the front.

Squeezing in such powerful hardware has resulted in other compromises, too. Archos has done away with a rear-facing camera completely, and the front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera is mediocre. Shots are grainy and lacking in detail, and the autofocus is slow. The built-in speaker is also disappointing, with both music and movie soundtracks sounding muffled and lifeless. Then there’s the battery life: the Archos struggled to only 5hrs 43mins in our looping video test.

The most notable weakness, however, is the 10.1in display. The 1,280 x 800 resolution is fine for everything from HD movies to surfing the web, but the overall image quality disappoints. The diamond grid pattern of the touchscreen’s capacitive layer is annoyingly visible at certain angles, giving the effect of a criss-crossed screen. Worse, our test images were subdued and lacking in vibrancy, and darker scenes in movies appeared washed out and lacking in detail.

Further testing with a calibrator backed up our subjective opinions: we measured the maximum brightness at a relatively low 244cd/m2, with a modest contrast ratio of 406:1. The Archos’ panel quite literally pales in comparison to pricier models, and looks weak even next to cheaper devices such as the ViewSonic ViewPad 10e.

Ultimately, the Archos 101 G9 Turbo ICS is powerful for the money, but there’s no getting away from the fact that its £280 price is only marginally cheaper than two other excellent tablets: the 16GB iPad 2 can now be had for £329, and the Sony Tablet S has fallen as low as £299. With both offering far superior design and displays, the Archos’ only real trump card is power. If you want a powerful tablet with the flexibility of Android you may be won over, but with Ice Cream Sandwich arriving on the Tablet S at the end of April, we know where we’d put our money.

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