Product Listing

Archos 9 PCtablet - The French Connection

By Kenny Yeo - 23 Jan 2010

Battery Life & Performance

Battery Life & Performance

What good is a portable device without a decent battery life? To see how it fares, we've lined it up against several other reasonably comparable devices. Viliv S5 MID , however, deserves special attention since it shares almost the same specifications, save for its smaller screen and speedier SSD hard drive.

 

Archos didn't provide exact specifications of the battery, but we found it to be good for up to 220 minutes (3 hours 40 minutes) of continuous video playback, which is certainly not too bad considering its screen size and specifications. Take note also that due to the different operating systems and form factor of the devices, the results here should only be used for referencing purpose and not for outright comparison.

The battery is removable, so you can always purchase and bring along additional battery packs for long trips.

Performance Benchmarking

Armed with a 1.1GHz Intel Atom Z510 processor, the Archos 9 PCtablet wasn't ever going to win any awards for speed. Although closely related to the Atom Z530 processor on the Viliv S5 MID, the Atom Z510 is down not only on clock speeds, but is also single-threaded. This really hampers performance, as our benchmarks show. Microsoft's own 1GB RAM limitation on such 'small notebook PCs', aren't helping it either.

Apart from the weak processor, the Archos 9 PCtablet is also let down by its absolutely archaic 60GB hard drive. The drive in question is a Toshiba MK6028GAL, which is actually of the PATA variety and spins at an idyllic 4200 rpm. And if you are wondering why the Viliv S5 MID's score on the hard disk test is so high, it's because the Viliv device is equipped with a solid state drive.

Using the Archos 9 PCtablet is therefore the ultimate test of patience as it takes ages to respond to your clicks. And unsurprisingly, the device is also unable to convincingly handle 1080p videos, which would jitter and pause randomly. In fact, playing 720p videos was also a stretch. While the playback of low bitrate HD videos might certainly have been possible, there's a wide variety out there and whether the Archos 9 PCtablet meets your expectations is a hit or miss affair. Hence, despite Archos' claims, you'd really be better off playing standard definition videos, which is a real pity, because the Archos has a really lovely screen.

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