Archos 9 Tablet comes with Windows 7

By: Pallab Jyotee Hazarika

The new Archos 9 Tablet UMPC runs Windows 7, and looks beautiful.

The Archos 9PC Tablet

 French are into business too! The French portable media giant Archos came up with quite a handful of UMPC or Tablet PCs or MID or whatever you would like to call them, the latest being the Archos 9. Archos officially calls it the Archos 9PC Tablet though. The company promises the performance of a high end PC with breathtaking aesthetics, excellent ergonomics and a tactile interface that ARCHOS has built their reputation on.

It is quite thin at only 0.63-inch and weighs less than 800gm. It has a glossy black case with both left and right end raise to give good hand-holding space. Both these areas have buttons with various functions like power on/off, trackball, up/down buttons etc. As the name suggests, it obviously doesnot have a physical keyboard, but how the virtual keyboard feels – we don’t know yet.

The ARCHOS 9 is powered by the new Intel ATOM Z515 processor, an 80GB hard disk, Bluetooth to tether wireless accessories, and 2 antennas to receive DVBT TV with diversity reception. But the uniqueness in this device is that this is probably the first commercially portable device to come pre-loaded with Windows 7, although it is not clear which version will it be – but I have every reason to believe it will be the Starter or at the most the Home Basic. It is to be noted that Windows 7 has not been commercially released yet, but is expected to ship by the time this MID gets released – so you can expect either a change of plan and compromization with either the release date or the OS if Windows 7 gets delayed. The beta version of the latest OS from Microsoft was made available for download in January for a month, and the RC was provided last April with atleast 36 new features (reported after getting about half a million feedbacks!).

This baby is set to be released by October with a hefty $635 price-tag on it.