Archos is starting to become a pretty big name as far as tablets go, cheap ones that is. They’re even expanding into other areas, like Android consoles and e-reading tablets. But for how long will the affordable tablets actually be appealing? Some of the models have the price as the only appeal and sacrifice some features and design. However, with the latest models that offer both good prices and good specs, things get tough for cheap slate makers.
We’ve got the Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, ASUS Transformer Pad 300, all of them with great quality and appealing prices. Considering the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 sell for $200, will Archos be able to sell its models now? It’s hard for them to achieve the $200 price point and give the public a quad core tablet. The problem is that Google and Amazon are giants, that afford to sell tablets at cost or at loss, since they have the services to push on tablets and make more cash.
An example of what lower end and cheaper tablet makers have to go through is the Archos 97 Carbon tablet, with $250 price point, single core CPU at 1 GHz, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. While on paper everything sounds OK, there’s not one person out there who wouldn’t pay the same price for a 16GB Tegra 3 Nexus 7. You get more for the same price and that’s still a low one. The only way to still make a buck here is the widespread release of the devices, covering more countries (and faster) the models like Kindle Fire and Nexus 7.
