MUSIC
This tablet is not for the music lover. Yes you can play songs, but the speaker is not good. It should only be used for IM calls. I either use headphones or my X-Mini speakers when watching movies or playing mp3 files in my tablet.
DISPLAY
The display/screen quality is nice and gives out vibrant colors. The screen is sensitive and very responsive for most of the time that you are using it. My decision to buy an 8 inch tablet rather than a 7 or 10 is proved to be a good one. I was happy watching videos on its screen. However, it has limited angle. It also has a lot of glare.
Speaking of videos, an odd thing happened. When I bought the unit, I could watch FLV and VOB files. But after the first firmware update, I can’t play those file types anymore. Archos customer support did not respond to my inquiry. SO I just bought the Cinema Plugin. After installing it, I can watch DVD .vob files again.
I bought an HDMI cable from CDR King to try out the TV Out feature. I plugged my Archos tablet to our LED TV and at first i had problems with the screen size, then my tablet froze, then I had to reboot it. I bought another HDMI cable (coz i left the first one at home) and plugged it to a different LED TV and it worked perfectly. No lags, no delays, it was smooth. I played games, ran some apps, showed some pics and videos. I had no problems from then on.
BROWSER/INTERNET BROWSING
There are three browsing modes, Flash, HTML5, Desktop. Web Browsing is a bit slow and laggy as the pages do not load totally e.g the page loads as your scrolling down even after waiting. In the first few days (and weeks i think), flash video playback in the browser often crashes the tab causing it to restart by itself. The performance is a bit better when you are using HTML5 browsing. I didn’t notice any difference when I’m on the desktop browsing mode. I think you only use this mode when you want the website to display pages like you are using a desktop computer.
I downloaded and installed Dolphin HD Browser, Opera mini, Skyfire, and of course, Firefox. And browsing is much better than the built-in browser – especially with Dolphin HD.
APPS AND GAMES
I’ve installed apps and games both for the tablet and some which are labeled “not available for your tablet”. You can check some of those installed here.
Like with previous Android versions, apps and games stay in the background even after you exit them – unless you go in and stop them with the honeycomb built-in task killer . God thing it has one, no need to download an app that kills other apps!
