Archos GamePad coming to the United States February 2013
Our friends in Europe have been enjoying the Archos GamePad since December, but Archos wasn’t interested in letting us US folks in on the fun at the same time. Heck, the company didn’t even give a peep as to when we might be seeing the gaming tablet in the United States at CES. We knew it’d be Q1, but had no clue which month to expect it.
Thankfully, an Archos rep at CES confirmed the release window for the device here in the States. We shouldn’t be going past February without seeing this device hit retailers, he says, and the price should be around $170. For that price, you’ll be getting a 7 inch 1024×600 display flanked by your standard affair of game controls. These controls can be mapped using an app that will come pre-installed on the device.
Internal specs include a 1.6GHz dual-core processor with a quad-core GPU, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. It should be powerful enough to run most games without any issues, but we won’t know until we try it out with games not totally optimized for Archos’ hardware.
Some users might be more inclined to go with a standalone tablet and pair it with a Bluetooth game controller for the sake of flexibility, but this is a nice, inexpensive package for anyone looking for little more than something to get their game on with. We’ll be looking to get a more refined date from Archos as we get closer to February.