[ale] Archos Tablet

[Pat Regan]

On Thu, 12 May 2011 07:41:09 -0400
John Pilman <jcpilman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Does anyone here have experience or knowledge of the Achos 101 tablet?
>  I am thinking of getting one for the following reasons:
> 
> ~ $300
> 10" dual touch capacitive screen
> WiFi
> It claims to dual boot Android and Linux Angstrom.
> It accepts micro SDHC and USB 2 flash drives.
> My primary purpose is to read PDF documents.

When I researched Archos' Android tablets I was a bit disappointed.
They didn't come with the Android market installed and it was a pain to
get it up and running on them.  The aftermarket firmware support was
pretty horrible as well.

We have a Nook Color here that I loaded Cyanogenmod on.  It has a 7
inch capacitive touch screen.  It has a very nice ips lcd panel, it
definitely runs fast enough, and the battery life has been pretty
good.  I think we've been getting about 5-6 hours of use out of a
charge.

> I tried testing one at BrandSmart in Kennesaw, but was not successful
> there.  That is, I plugged in a flash drive and saw my files, but the
> tablet failed to open a PDF when I selected it.

I hate reading PDF files on either my Sony e-ink reader or the Nook or
my phone.  I think the biggest problem is that PDF files are formatted
for a particular paper size which doesn't conform to the aspect ratio
of the screen.

I have Adobe's PDF reader on my phone, and I use that in a pinch if I
have to pull a PDF off of a web site.  It works, but I sure wouldn't
want to read a book with it.

I convert just about everything to epub using Calibre.  It doesn't
always do a good job of converting pdf files, though.

Pat