Archos unveils 10-Inch Tablet for $349

Faster, better, cheaper: Pick any two. Archos seems to have chosen better and cheaper for its upcoming "G9" Android tablets, where "better" means "more powerful" and "more storage space." But will that make either of them a better choice than the iPad 2?

The Archos G9 will come in two flavors, the 8-inch and the 10.1-inch. Both will have a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, which may make them more powerful than similarly-priced PC laptops. These are Android tablets, though, so you're not going to be running PC apps on them.

Archos' pedigree involves making media players, and the G9 tablets are designed for heavy-duty HD video watching. Both can supposedly play 1080p video without breaking a sweat, unlike the iPad 2, and will be able to output it through their HDMI ports without needing a special adapter.

A 16 GB iPad 2 can hold about half a dozen 720p HD movies, depending on filesize, and that's if you don't put any music on it or take any pictures with it. The Archos G9 Android tablets will have 250 GB hard drives, letting them hold up to 40 movies in full 1080p.

Downsides:
The G9s' biggest downside may be in the apps department. First off, the Android Market doesn't have nearly as many tablet-specific apps as the App Store does. And no, the G9s won't be able to run the 65,000 iPad apps; only an iPad can do that.

Second, app loading times. Think of how long it takes for an app or game to load on your smartphone. Well, the bottleneck isn't processor speed; it's how fast it can load the data off of whatever it's stored on. And the flash memory used by the iPad and most smartphones and memory cards is a heck of a lot faster than your laptop's hard drive.

The Archos G9s will be using hard drives instead of flash memory. So while it may be too early to tell, it's probably a safe bet that games and apps will take longer to load than on other tablets.

More downsides to the tablet:
Another thing to consider is that Archos has never been known for its devices' quality. They're harder to quantify, but they can be the difference between a tablet you love and a cheap piece of junk that won't do what you want it to.

Archos' previous devices had their fans, but they didn't have Android Market access and tended to have resistive touch screens; Nintendo DS-style single-touch screens that you used with a fingernail or a stylus. Neither of these design decisions screamed "quality."

With prices as low as $349 for the 10-inch tablet, and $279 for the 8-inch model, one has to wonder what design tradeoffs were made.

Neither tablet will ship with 3G capability, but 3G wireless Internet access can be added via a $49 adapter and a pay-as-you-go plan. The tablets will be available at the end of September.

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