Check back around January 6-9th, I will post extensive video coverage from Archos booth at CES, expect them to display Archos 7 Home Tablet v2, Archos Vision 35/50 250/500GB, Archos 70b eReader and more. Probably they will be proudly showing off the whole Gen8 as it seems only now are they able to ramp up manufacturing to meet more of the demand in the US and worldwide markets. If they could also use the event to showcase finalized Flash, and announce the promise for Gingerbread/Honeycomb firmware updates would be great to reassure the media. I’d find it fun if Archos would also unveil a $199 OMAP4430 ARM Cortex-A9 Powered Chrome OS laptop (they can use the open source Chromium OS for prototype demonstrations) and a $149 OMAP4430 ARM Cortex-A9 Powered Google TV set-top-box project, even if only prototypes or mockups to only be released 3 months later.
The price in Europe seems to be 149 euros, it might be around $179 in the USA, bhphotovideo.com has it for sale at $189. It’s using the new Rockchip RK2818 processor that can run at up to 1ghz but may be limited at 800mhz for heat/battery consideration, it runs Android 2.1 with better features and more hardware/software optimizations, the DSP and graphics are faster to improve video and web browsing. I filmed it here demonstrated by the Rockchip engineers:
This is a 500GB Western Digital 2.5″ external hard drive, it’s not powered and that works on the Archos 101 Internet Tablet because that one is outputting enough power on USB to power the hard drive.
Wi-Fi: fix Wi-Fi stuck after a while when using WPA2/AES encryption mode
Wi-Fi: fix cannot connect on channels above 11 due to wrong default regulation domain
Power management: for A43/A70/A101 add a setting in about device to allow 3 levels of power management. Overdrive that allows CPU max frequency to be 1GHz with ondemand governor, optimal that brings CPU max frequency to 800MHz with ondemand governor and powersave that set CPU max frequency to 800MHz with conservative governor
Indexing: faster rescan is now achieved at USB disconnect
Storage: SDCard now supports NTFS (read only) and EXT3
Storage: fix sdcard not recognized sometimes when swapping different cards brands
Video: fix subtitles on A101
Network shares: enhance scanning speed
Network shares: handle the case where a server shares are not visible if not authenticated
Network shares: allow in wireless settings to define manually a server authentication details
Network shares: reload samba and UPnP services when switching between access points without disconnecting
Audio: a silent mode (Global Mute) has been enabled in the power button menu. It will impact all streams except alarms in case one select alarms sound always on in alarm settings
Application: appslib is now reinstalled after an Android device reset
Application: fix quadrant CPU benchmark
Power: fix shutdown sometimes happening on short power button press
Internationalization: support for Korean codepage tags and subtitles
Multimedia: use smaller memory footprint for decoding H264 SD
Memory management: achieve more progressive kill in low memory situation
Boot: fix deadlock happening sometimes preventing device to complete boot
Just like for Gen6 and Gen7, Archos is releasing a “Special Edition Firmware” for all the Gen8 tablets, what this potetially allows is to dual-boot the Archos tablets with all types of embedded Linux OS such as alternative Android firmwares, Ubuntu, Angstrom or even Meego.
Basically this SDE firmware voids warranty (because potential hardware damage through over-clocking is no longer under Archos control), and it replaces the need for someone to hack root access to the official firmware. Basically it ads support for dual-booting alternative OS, and you can still continue to have the default normal Android OS image and update that just as normal as well. Discuss Open Development in the Open Development forum section: http://forum.archosfans.com/viewforum.php?f=34
