The 8-inch form of the iPad mini has been well received. It allows for a large canvas to play with, while keeping the device fairly mobile. It comes to me as no surprise that not only a lot of Chinese companies, but also many international OEMs (*cough* Nokia *cough*) have gone for the design.
The Archos 80 Cesium that’s on its way looks to do pretty much the same, but with the Windows OS on board. And therefore, it’ll have the quad-core Intel Atom Z3735G Bay Trail underneath the hood. Besides that, the 8-inch 1280 x 800p tablet will pack a gig of RAM, 16GB of storage and a camera duo of a 2 mega-pixel rear sensor and a VGA front.
A 4,000mAh battery will keep the show going on the 80 Cesium. The tablet will also offer expandable storage via a microSD slot, which will take up to 128GB. The 8 incher was initially announced for US$149, but as Liliputing suggests rightly, we might well see the tablet get a price cut before launch, thanks to aggressive pricing from the competition.
Oh and yes, the 80 Cesium too will have a year’s worth of subscription to Microsoft’s office suite, Office 365. More details about the device on the Archos listing here.
Windows is a bad OS for anything below 10-12 inches. In 10-12 is sufferable (think small ultrabooks), but it’s from 12 inches on where it shines. So I like how they use the wintel combination but I think they chose the wrong screen dimension (it should had been 10 inches in the least)…
I’m just in love with the fact that you can carry a full blown Pc in your pocket. As this trend goes on, MS will look for ways of making this more user friendly with small devices. Besides I think it is more friendly when you stick to apps in the windows store
Yeah but windows apps are just that *apps*, I mean what’s the point of a full blown windows machine if you end up using it like any other tablet. My point is that the extensive back library of windows can only be used well in 12 inches and above. I owned a net book, and it was barely workable…
Way too expensive, you can get a 2gb Ram and 32gb of disk space for 159 USD, so why bother with that one?