Stefan Mileschin

The saga of the Archos G9 tablets, once dubbed the world's fastest, has been a little drawn out. Archos originally intended to have 1.5 GHz variants out by this holiday season, but we can now confirm that the week of December 5th US buyers will be able to get their hands on the 1.2 GHz Archos 80 and 101 G9 Turbo lines. Pricing should reflect the prior annoucnements, and performance should be similar to the other recent Honeycomb tablets. To review, these 8" and 10.1" tablets differentiate themselves from the pack most by their inclusion of 250 GB of mechanical storage, perfect for media hogs.

Part of our excitement when we first caught wind of these tablets was that they were based on the launch platform for Ice Cream Sandwich, making this potentially one of the easier ports for this tablet generation. Archos aims to please, targeting the release of their ICS port for the end of 1Q12. That might seem like a lot of time given the hardware similarities to the Galaxy Nexus, but consider that the Archos name is made on their vast codec support, and media capabilities, which may take some time to bake into Android 4.0.

The last bit of news we received was that Archos would have G9 models based on TI's OMAP 4460 SoC waiting for us at CES. Though similar to the OMAP 4430, the increased CPU and GPU clocks (1.5 GHz and 384 MHz, respectively) should provide a satisfying boost in performance. We'll update with confirmed pricing when we have it.

Pricing has been confirmed as $299 and $379 for the 80 and 101 G9 Turbo 16GB models, respectively. This takes the spot of the original 1.0 GHz 80 G9, which never saw release here, and is just a $10 premium over the non-Turbo 101 G9. Archos will also be offering a free case and free shipping on both devices when they go on sale next week.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5180/a...ased-g9-at-ces