Despite all rumors and predictions calling this year’s CES rather boring and uneventful beforehand, the Vegas reality proved the pundits dead wrong. While some of the big guys, including Samsung, LG and HTC, were awfully silent, it was the smaller companies that brought the heat.
Alcatel, ZTE and Huawei are only some of the names that shined these past few days, either due to the number of devices revealed or with the quality of the brand spanking new gadgets. You can add a new name to that list now, Archos, despite the company’s newest Platinum 97 and 80 tabs not getting exactly what you’d call gala presentations.
In fact, we don’t even think the duo was introduced officially to the world, with Archos simply putting the two tabs on display in the company’s Vegas booth. But that didn’t help the Platinums escape the public eye, so we’re happy to bring you some close-up images with them, as well as bits and pieces out of their spec sheets.
We’re going to kick off the ceremonies with the more impressive member of the new tablet family, the Platinum 97. This is a very faithful iPad “clone” with Jelly Bean on top, which is bound to grab the attention of tech enthusiasts, but also Cupertino lawyers.
And we’re not just talking about the design, though some will definitely be fooled by this big guy’s outward appearance in thinking it’s an Apple iDevice. The 9.7-inch IPS panel is itself a duplicate of the display sported by the latest-gen iPad, boasting the same 2,048 x 1,536 pixels resolution.
Humming behind the hood there’s a quad-core 1.2 GHz CPU and an undetailed eight core GPU, which makes this an almost ideal multimedia, browsing and gaming machine. We absolutely love the vanilla Android 4.1 experience too, while the dual 2 MP cameras are average, but decent.
The rest of the spec sheet is kept under wraps for now, but we expect at least 16 GB of on-board memory, 1 GB of RAM and microSD support. As far as pricing goes, the Platinum 97 will not exactly be budget-friendly, but at $329 it won’t be too expensive either.
The 97’s smaller brother, the Platinum 80, is not as “hot-tempered” as the 9.7-incher, but it also kind of resembles an Apple tablet – the iPad Mini. The 8-inch IPS screen boasts a 1,024 x 768 pixels resolution, while the stock Android 4.1, quad-core 1.2 GHz processor and dual 2 MP cams are present here as well.
There are a number of things to be revealed about the 80 too at a future time, but the price point and ETA are not among them. The 8-incher is therefore expected to land in March (like its bigger brother) for just $199.
Now, does anyone fancy a Jelly Bean-flavored iPad doppelganger? Or do you think buying one of these would feel like betraying Android?
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