Archos has been plugging away at tablets longer than almost all of its rivals. The Arnova 10 sits towards the bottom of the company's sizeable range, priced at a lowly £150 or thereabouts. It's not designed to compete with high-end models like the iPad 2, but rather to provide a better experience than the flood of cheap devices now appearing on the market from unheard of Chinese brands.
Wide boy
The Arnova 10 is based around a large, wide-screen, 10.1-inch display. The tablet is far wider than it is tall -- much more so than most other tablets on the market. As a result, it feels rather top-heavy when you're holding it in portrait orientation.
The screen dominates the front of the device, but there's also a small camera peeping out of the bezel. The tablet is fairly slim at 13.5mm, and it's constructed entirely from plastic, with a mock brushed-aluminium section surrounding the screen. Although nowhere near as sturdy as high-end tablets like the iPad 2, the build quality isn't bad.
The only physical controls are mounted on the left-hand edge. They include a volume rocker button and a power button that doubles as a lock switch. Beneath these, there's a full-sized USB port for connecting memory keys or hard drives to the tablet, plus a micro-USB port that's used for syncing it with a PC. You can't charge the tablet over USB, however. Instead, you have to use the charging port that's found beneath the micro-USB port.
The left side of the device is also home to the microSD card slot, which you can use to boost the device's internal storage. Our review model had 4GB of storage space, but there's also an 8GB version available for about £50 extra.
Stale Eclair software
The tablet runs Android 2.1 Eclair, which is far from the latest version of Google's mobile operating system. It's rather baffling that Archos has used this version, as 2.1 Eclair is generally considered to be slower than 2.2 Froyo, and the Arnova 10 isn't a high-powered device to begin with.
Because the device doesn't have any physical buttons for controlling Android, Archos has instead put its own skin over the top of the software to provide virtual home, back and menu buttons. These have been placed at the top of the screen, though, so they're awkward to use when you're holding the tablet in landscape mode.
The USB port on the side lets you connect memory sticks to the Arnova 10.
Unfortunately, because this tablet doesn't have a built-in compass, GPS or mobile-phone functionality, it doesn't meet the minimum specifications needed for access to the Android Market. This is a big limitation, as some apps just aren't available elsewhere. Instead of the Android Market, Archos has loaded the device with the AndroLib app store. This is easy to use, but you won't find anything like the same number of apps on its shelves.
Archos doesn't say which processor this device uses, but it's certainly not one of the faster ones, because the Arnova 10 feels quite sluggish. For example, when we tried the Pulse news reader app, screens were slow to redraw and pages rendered sluggishly. Web browsing is slow and the gaming experience is poor too, with Angry Birds just about chugging along.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Archos' background in portable media players, the Arnova 10 plays videos without any problems. It even handles 720p MKV files without complaining.
Woeful touchscreen
The biggest problem is the screen. It's bright and its resolution of 1,024x600 pixels is pretty high for a device of this price, so video looks crisp and text is rendered well on Web pages. But the touchscreen is of the resistive, rather than capacitive, type. The upshot is that it's horribly slow to register finger presses, and this makes simple tasks like scrolling through menus a real hassle. You often have to press on the display multiple times to get it to respond and, when this isn't enough, you have to resort to using a fingernail.
The Arnova 10's battery life isn't wonderful either. We had to charge it at the end of each day, and Archos itself only rates the battery as good for four hours of video playback.
Conclusion
If you're primarily looking for a cheap video player to keep the kids entertained during long car journeys, the Archos Arnova 10 will be fine. But, if you're looking for an Internet tablet, then its sluggish performance, unresponsive touchscreen and lack of multi-touch support will soon grate.
Edited by Charles Kloet
Android App 
RSS Feeds 
iPhone App 
Newsletters
User reviews2
Add your review
gremlin 22 May 2012
Good: it's light and has a good sized screen and is really clear
Bad: where do I start!
Comment: My daughter bought me this for my birthday and there has been more bad language and frustration due to it than anything else. I've felt like throwing it across the room every day at least once. On facebook it's constantly saying there is a data connectivity problem and won't connect or stay connected. It won't allow me to send emails from my hotmail account, it lets me hit reply but then won't bring up the keyboard. It also will let you type a whole message on facebook from the "new message" box but once it's finished it won't send it.
The battery doesn't last a great deal of time and it gets very hot. It does allow me to watch tv from the on demand sites and most of the time it's pretty good but has frozen sometimes. If I touch areas ie to go to a file it says it's copying text to clipboard but so far I haven't found said clipboard! Scrolling is hit and miss, sometimes it won't move and other times it flys so quickly you can't get to where you want to be. I was really excited when I got it but there are little bugs that have sent me up the wall. It doesn't allow me to do some surveys as it's not compatible or it will let me do nearly all of one then decide it doesn't like a section and I can't finish which really drives me nuts. If you know how to fix the issues inherent in the system it's greatt but for the average person it's really annoying.
sonymad 21 March 2012
Good: very nice price high res screen nice android good video playback easy to use portable fin and lightwaight
Bad: sluggish you might be better of with a kindle fire
Comment: Introduction:
Tablets as a market are gradually coming down in the price, especially with the release of faster dual-core processors and novel iterations of the iPad. In response to this, the cost of entry-level tablets are plummeting, and many brands are additionally releasing tablets with reasonable specifications for a cut down price. These new low cost tablets obviously don't sport the features of the more expensive tablets but are more than capable of handling the more regular activities that users want to undertake.
Specifications:
Capacity • Flash memory: 8 GB* or 4 GB*
• Extendable via micro SDHC Slot
Operating system • ANDROID™ 2.3 “Gingerbread”
Processor • ARM Cortex A8 1 GHz
Display characteristics • 10.1” capacitive multitouch screen, TFT LCD, 16 million colors
• screen resolution : 1024 x 600
Video Playback1 • H.264 up to 1080p resolution – 30 fps / 5 Mbps.
• MPEG-42 – 30 fps / 2.5 Mbps.
• Realvideo™ up to 720p resolution – 30 fps / 2.5 Mbps.
With the above codecs, the device can play video files with the following extensions: .avi .mp4,mkv, .mov, and .flv
Audio Playback1 • MP3, WAV, APE, OGG, FLAC
Photo viewer3 • JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG
Interfaces • Micro USB slave 2.0: Mass Storage Class (MSC)
• Micro SD slot (SDHC compatible)
Communication protocols • WiFi (802.11 b/g)
Miscellaneous • 720p camera
• Built-in speaker
• Microphone
• G-sensor
Power source • Internal: Lithium Polymer battery
• USB Power adapter/charger
Dimensions & weight • 270 mm x 150 mm x 12 mm (10.6” x 5.9” x 0.47”) – 540 g / 19 oz.
Compatibility • Microsoft® Windows® XP, Vista, 7 or higher, Mac OS or Linux in mass storage mode
Computer Interface • USB 2.0 interface
Package includes • ARNOVA 10 G2, USB cable, Power adapter, Quick Start Guide (QSG), legal and safety notice
Review:
The Arnova 10 G2 sports the same body design as the Archos 101 which provides a strong, thin and lightweight surround for the 10.1 inch multitouch capacitive screen. In contrast to the Archos 101, the Arnova 10 G2 has cut out a few features including the HDMI and bluetooth, however in our opinion, the average user won't be overly disappointed with this - after all most of us don't often use bluetooth to transfer files and with the advent of internet TVs the HDMI isn't that necessary.
With the inbuilt 1GHz ARM Cortex processor, the Gingerbread (Android 2.3) operating system is fluid and responsive handling the majority of games happily, although it is worth checking compatibility before buying (as with a lot of tablets!). The screen is nice and responsive and responds well to touch, making typing an easy affair. As a media plater, the speakers are actually really quite impressive compared to some we have heard (or should I say tried to hear!) and the video playback is great. The Arnova 10 G2 also works fine as an ebook reader using either the installed software or alternatives, and PDFs are easily fitted onto the screen as full pages.
File transfer to the tablet is best through the USB connection and on the unit we tested (the 8GB version), there was plenty of room for storage, with another microSD port for expansion of memory up to a further 32GB. It must be noted that the android build we used didn't really offer much room for a lot of additional apps, however there are a number of alternative firmwares for the device that rectify this problem (with a bit of tinkering) and also give root accesibility to the device which allows far better control over system management (see the end of the review for links). In addition, the standard firmware doesn't offer access to the Android Market, instead offering "appslib" - an alternative, slightly cut down version of the Android Market provided by Archos (Again this can be remedied by downloading a set of base APKs and installing them manually to the device or using "Arctools" that somewhat automates the process). The tablet can also support flash, but only to version 10.3 which is sufficient to seamlessly browse any websites we tried.
Battery life is sufficient, although not awe-inspiring, and certainly not comparable with the top tablet models (iPads and similar) but happily giving around 6 hours with fairly heavy use. Once the battery has depleted, charging has to be done using the provided wall plug charger, which is a slight disappointment as it would have been great to have been able to charge from USB.
Price:
£138 (available from HMV)
Verdict:
4/5 - For the price, the Arnova 10 G2 provides a excellent and solid entry-level android tablet for everything from video playback to web browsing and ebook reading. The savings that have been made to offer this specification at this price will not really be missed by most users and with the availibility of custom firmwares, those with a need to tweak will be able to get everything they want from the tablet.
See all 2 user reviews