“Tablets have become a crucial piece of hardware in many consumers’ tech lineups,” Archos chief Loic Proier said in a statement. “We wanted to expand our Diamond line to include a tablet without sacrificing any of the specs that make an ARCHOS Diamond special.”
To wit, the Diamond Tab sports a 7.9″ IPS screen at an impressively high resolution — 2048 x 1536 (which is “more than 2K,” Archos notes) — and a 1.7 GHz octa-core Mediatek processor. It’s got a 4,800 mAh battery and 3GB of RAM, too, and packs a front (2MP) and rear (5MP) camera.
The Tab’s headlining hardware, though, may be its 4G LTE and dual-band Wi-Fi antennas — Archos asserts they’re nearly unheard of at the Tab’s £179.00 ($200) price point. And the specific cellular implementation — Cat.4 LTE — supports a theoretical maximum download speed of to 150Mbps, the company says, which is undeniably speedy.
On the firmware side, the Diamond Tab ships with Android 5.1 Lollipop and access to the Google Play store. Somewhat unusually, there wasn’t any mention of pre-loaded, proprietary, or sponsored apps in the press release — Archos is taking a decidedly hands-off approach to software, which should very much please any user who values storage space and an uncluttered home screen.
So how’s the Diamond Tab stack up agains the Android tablet competition? Pretty favorably. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 4, perhaps its most visible 7-inch adversary, omits 4G connectivity and settles for a 1280×800 panel, half the RAM, and a smaller battery. Acer’s 7.9-inch Acer Iconia A1 compromises further, slimming RAM to 1GB and resolution to 1024×768. In brief: the Tab’s not a bad buy.
The Diamond Tab will be available online in October. We expect to see more of it at IFA in September.
