Certainly not the first and probably not the last either, in the last few days Archos has announced it’s own take on the tablet gaming phenomenon. The Archos GamePad is an upcoming 7″ tablet with gaming controls integrated. It’ll cost about $250 and boasts a dual 1.5Ghz processor and the quad core variant of the Mali400 GPU. There is no word on the exact SoC used, but given that Archos seemed to favour RockChip in some of its older tablets, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that it is utilising the newish RK3066.
Apparently Archos have worked to add controller support for touchscreen only games, which if done well should provide a seamless integration for both new and old software titles available for Android. The machine will run Android 4.x and the screen resolution is rumoured to be 1280×800. No word on release date yet, and I can’t find anything but renders either, which may mean it’s a little while away from hitting stores. Maybe this will bridge the gap between all those JXD tablets that so nearly got it right, by including real dual analog and a well optimized Android port. We’ll have to wait and see.
