iPad3Gwifi

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1. 

   T. Tavlas "t_tavlas" April 30, 2011 9:43 pm

   135 of 136 people found the following review helpful:

   360 degree Archos 101 review, February 17, 2011

   By T. Tavlas “t_tavlas” –
     

   This review is from: ARCHOS 101 Internet Tablet 16GB (Personal Computers)

   I have been using Archos 101 for a month and I thought my experience might be useful for the other Amazon visitors. Before Archos 101 product, I had a chance of using iPad and Samsung Galaxy tab – which are our test tablets for the applications we developed. All tablet devices have their own pros and cons, I think as a buyer you are the one who know your needs best and you can decide which one fits your requirements. I would like to evaluate the product from different aspects: SCREEN SIZE: It has 10.1 excellent high resolution capacitive multitouch screens – be careful it is rectangular, not square type like iPad and the rest of the other 10inches (if you are looking for a case – this might be good to know) in the market. You can use it comfortably at both vertical and horizontal levels. The only problem with the screen is the angle limitation – if you do not have the correct angle, you might have some difficulties in looking at the screen. Practically it means it is for only one person use (good for privacy bad for sharing) – if want to watch a romantic HD movie with a loved one, you need to put it to a long distance (such a win-win: you can both watch the movie and there is nothing between you & the loved one!). SPEED: It has 1GB ARM Cortex A8 processer (same with Samsung Galaxy Tab) but 256mb RAM (512mb at Samsung). It is neither fast, nor slow. Firmware upgrades can help to increase the performance and at normal system use around 100 mb is free. If you use android it is always a good idea to limit the use of widgets, as they are consuming so much power of the device. I know they are nice and using them is the nature of android but try to limit yourself with only the “must haves”. In return, you are going to get a better performance. BATTERY and WEIGHT: One word: Excellent. None of the other tables can compete with Archos 101 in its category. Superb battery performance and very light table. Also, it is a handsome device. I have been using it with a leather case (bought from eBay) and to my surprise, since the case on it – it has been started to be noticed by the people around. (Moral of the story for attention gathering purpose – a leather case alone without tablet would be fine and cheaper solution!). It is 480 gr (10 inch), Samsung Tab is 380 gr (7inch) and iPad is 730 gr (9.8 inch) MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE: This is the specialty of Archos, as they are very famous with their MP3 and multimedia devices. While you are listening moonlight sonata, you can answer your mails or surf on the net. Plus, it is possible to watch almost any video format in this device. I was a little disappointed to see that Archos is selling plug-ins to support some video formats – this is a cheap way to make money in my opinion. Don’t worry; android market is at your service! You can find lots of excellent video players (and more) in the market as free. One more tip: if you install Skype – you got a phone on it! MARKET and Other Apps: One of the main advantage of buying a tablet from a well-know brand is after sale support. In some forums I observed some users complained about installing market and some other problems with the applications (including flash, YouTube etc.). Thanks God, Archos fans created some groups on the net and very decent to share their experiences (a personal note: android users in general loves to share and expand the platform). If the instructions explained there followed carefully this is not an issue. Of course there is always a possibility that sometimes a defective product may hit you. In this case, it might be good idea to send the product back for refund or change. HDMI, WI-FI, Bluetooth and USB: Working all fine. Even so I have never managed to use Tethering function of the product. I wonder if it is a defect on the Archos 101 or in my understanding how to use it. Having a 3G tablet has tremendous advantages – for sure. However, you need to pay quite extra for it during the purchase, plus the monthly data package charges is very costly. In my opinion – unless you are always on the move – 3G tablet investment’s return does not justify itself. Even if you are always on the move if you set up the connection between your phone and Archos 101 (either in the form of Bluetooth, usb or wifi hotspot) – there would be no problem on your side. HOW TO INSTALL ANDROID MARKET to ARCHOS 101: You need to follow easy 2 steps to install the apps to Archos 101. Step 1: The tablet comes with pre-installed Archos market app. First You need to use it and download Archtools application from the Archos market (you can do this without sign up to Archos Market). Then by using Archtools app, you can download application packages (in total 2) provided by Archos that includes flash player, google maps, gmail, android market and other useful programs…

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2. 

   Ryne April 30, 2011 9:56 pm

   162 of 174 people found the following review helpful:

   The Archos 101 is a value for the pricetag, November 24, 2010

   By Ryne (Reno, NV USA) –

   This review is from: ARCHOS 101 Internet Tablet 16GB (Personal Computers)

   I ordered the Archos 101 Internet Tablet from Archos’ own website about a week ago with the first release and received it a few days ago. I was excited to get my first tablet, and the price tag didn’t make me fear starvation as a college student, a fear which the Galaxy Tab is all too enthusiastic to give. I had expected a little more from the device, and my own possibly defective unit may have hindered my experience somewhat. It’s being replaced soon, and if my problems are not present in the next unit I’ll probably keep it. We all know that Android isn’t really ready for tablets, or so Google has told us, but we’re all a little anxious to see what the experience would be like. Us early adopters know no bounds, and our research has led us here, to the Archos 101 Internet Tablet. It’s price tag makes it a prime choice in comparison to most of the major-brand tablets being released as you read, but that price comes with certain drawbacks that any informed consumer should be aware of. To begin with, the problems: The digitizer on the touchscreen is not particularly sensitive, and operates at a very low operating resolution. It also loses its calibration quite often (about every 20-40 minutes) and I was unaware that a capacitive touchscreen even could lose its calibration. Unfortunately this loss of calibration isn’t always slight, and sometimes it will seriously take hours of fiddling with different points on the screen to navigate through the menus to recalibrate. I called Archos about this and my unit is being RMAed, so this could just be a feature exclusive to my dud. The build-quality is unbelievably poor. Seriously, you don’t want to take this tablet out of the house. The metal plates covering the two small areas on the back are incredibly flimsy, and even changing your grip on the tablet causes a cascade of ripples through the LCD. The LCD also sports pretty narrow viewing angles, severe enough to cause saturation and brightness distortion between your eyes’ different perspectives when held in portrait mode. The Wifi isn’t particularly good. Signal strength is poor and intermittent, and I can’t actually even use a wireless connection unless I am in the same room as my router without it dropping out. Unfortunately the speed of the connection during those fleeting moments of connectivity also leaves much to be desired. I haven’t run any benchmarks on it’s networking speed, but you definitely don’t need to worry about breaking any records. Worst camera man has ever made. This wasn’t really a big deal for me, since I don’t really see using videochat on a Wifi-only tablet being much of a selling point here, but this camera is horrible. Poor color reproduction, a ridiculous level of noise being picked up by the sensor, and poor contrast makes for a washed out lifeless grainy facsimile of your face. Not good for self-esteem. And now, the good: It’s pretty fast. I don’t have to worry about running programs eating too many resources, and the browser is quick and snappy. It’s ridiculously easy to put Google Marketplace on. Seriously, I did it using just the tablet. Download gapps4archos, enable sideloading apps from the settings menu, and you’re good to go. It takes about 3 minutes from Google to complete, and you can do the whole operation without touching your computer. The screen is huge. I was back and forth between the Archos 70 and 101 for quite a while, and I finally decided that the 101 would be fun to try, being essentially a netbook sized tablet. The added space, both in terms of the increase in resolution and the increase in actual size, is fantastic. I always fall for high-resolution devices, and while I wish I could get something with a resolution higher than this in a 7 inch package this definitely serves both its purpose and my desires. HDMI output. Need say no more. Good playback of both video and audio, with a pretty wide selection of formats supported right off the bat. Good 3D acceleration. I don’t know who the manufacturer of the “Open GL acceleration” feature is, but it seems to work pretty reasonably. The game comes pre-loaded with some half-baked racing game. While the free game is bad, the visuals in it are pretty decent. Good battery life. I’ve only charged it twice over the last 3 days. Considering the amount of poking, prodding, and fondling I’ve done – and as I’m sure any good nerd does to their new toy – it has held up pretty well. I’d estimate somewhere around 4 hours with wifi on and about 6 with it off. I had the back light at about 50% Decent little speakers. The speakers on the back are pretty loud and only mildly tinny, about the same quality or a little better than most net book speakers. MicroSDHC slot and…

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3. 

   Eric Laffoon "ubergeek" April 30, 2011 10:07 pm

   84 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

   This is the tablet I’ve been waiting for!, December 5, 2010

   By Eric Laffoon “ubergeek” (Portland, OR USA) –
     

   This review is from: ARCHOS 101 Internet Tablet 8GB (Personal Computers)

   First off I’m not new to Archos. I first bought their gen 5 device that made other personal media players look silly and had wifi and a touch screen. Each new generation impressed me. Last year I bought the first Android tablet I ever saw, the gen 7 Archos 5 IT. It was launched in Oct 2009 with a lot of flaws, but was a compelling device. By early 2010 it had become stable and very impressive but I always wanted a bigger screen. I bought their gen 8 7 inch A70 and the 10.1 inch A101 as soon as they were available on the Archos web site. I wanted to buy on Amazon but the demand for these tablets has been so intense they have been selling out every shipment in hours or days. Before I get to the good and bad let me address some comments here. It is important to realize with technology that your experience may or may not be the norm. Some people said they have trouble with wifi. I have had this on my home system with 35 Mbps Fios and WPA2, my Clear WiMax with WEP and my Rooted Vibrant mobile AP with WPA2. It is brilliant at finding, locking and holding signal and can find signal farther than other devices. Having said that Archos recently acknowledged a problem with WPA AES they are working on with the chip set manufacturer. Also the touch screen is very sensitive, some have said more so then their phone. Now for the bad… The screen has to be the worst thing, and at that nobody I have showed it to has complained. Unlike my A70 which has excellent viewing angles the A101 I received not only has limited angles but it seems to favor being tipped away from me and gets bad from straight on in landscape mode. It also has a lot of glare under lights. I’m going to get an anti glare screen protector. There is also a cross hatch pattern visible when it is off and black. This is the first Archos product I considered exchanging, but oddly enough once I started using it I didn’t seem to notice. In use it is bright and sharp. Showing it to people nobody said anything about viewing angles or screen problems. I frequent archosfans forum and I’m not confident my viewing angle observations are universal to all A101 tablets. Ironically before updating my A70 was not as crisp as my A101 as far as lag. Keep in mind my phone is blazingly fast. The Froyo update made things faster but some people noted it was under clocked at 800 Mhz, though performance is the same or better. I used Z4Root to temporarily root and another program to set the CPU max back to 1 GHz and it is quite smooth. Additionally Flash on the Froyo release is less than perfect but Archos announced they are waiting for their agreement with Adobe to be finalized to release their authorized Flash that is hardware optimized. If you’re not a geek that means once the legal contracts are in order instead of using the central processor for intense calculations it passes it off to the graphics processor which can handle it with less work and frees up everything else at the same time. The net result should be much nicer and smoother. Now for the good. First off Archos is known for buggy initial releases that get a lot better with a few of their continued updates. Several months in with their last tablet they released hardware graphics drivers that netted the tablet among the very best scores of any Android device for graphics. This release has been good and should get even better. Still it helps if you are willing to putter around a bit, install the market hack and go to archosfans.com if you have a problem. Archos has decent support, but the community support is awesome. The new media players are excellent. Other Android devices are left wanting but Archos has been working on the core media player for 10 years and it shows with a wide variety of codecs handled flawlessly. Archos also performs to the battery specs they list. For this tablet you can play with it all day long, browse the web and watch videos and not have to charge until late. Charging is very fast with the AC adapter. The best part of this device is the huge screen real estate for a tablet and how responsive it is. The built in stereo speakers are surprisingly good, full and loud. The kick stand is great. What really gets impressive though is what it can do extra. Yes, you can add memory with Micro SD. You can also play media over UPnP and SMB. Beyond that you have a full size USB host plug. Take your nice high end camera, take some pictures and plug it in to your A101 to download and see it in big screen glory, or grab a 500 GB drive and take your entire media collection with you. Get a micro HDMI cable and you can not only play movies out to your TV but your entire experience moves to the TV with the Archos becoming a touch pad. Get a game control or Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, even a USB controller. You can browse the web in 720p on your big screen from the couch or do a slide show or whatever for friends. I had the A70 in my booth at a…

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