As I was such a good girl last year I decided to ask Santa for an Internet Tablet (Having a slight obsession with gadgets and not wanting to be left out of the current trend I thought it was only right!). I knew Santa wasn’t going to buy me an iPad so I asked for an Archos 101.

First impressions of the Archos was how light it was, weighing in at 480g it was a mere feather compared to the RM Slate (slab) that I held for a while at BETT (yes I know, bad comparison as the Slate is pretty much a laptop etc etc) but the Archos is very comfortable to carry around.

My version is the 8gig but there is a 16 available, both extendable with a microSD. It has a 10.1 inch capacitive screen, hence the name, a camera on the front, kick stand, full size USB, micro USB and a HDMI port....Oh and it supports Flash.

Being only £250 to buy, it does feel rather plastic and has a slight flex to it; if you hold it in a certain place it presses on the screen from behind and makes a pretty ripple effect.

When using any of the ports, you never quite feel that the cables are pushed in enough, but they don’t go any further, not massively keen on that. The one thing I found quite amusing is the placement of power port. When I first plugged it in to juice it up, I didn’t really look at where i was sticking the power supply and stuck it in the hole nearest to the power button but was a bit worried when i noticed it wasn’t charging, on closer inspection it turned out i had stuck it in the earphone socket (bit of a fail). Whilst browsing on the internet, turns out that I’m not the only one who did that!

It came with Eclair but was quickly updated to Froyo once connected to the wireless. It comes pre-installed with the Archos marketplace called “AppsLib” which is targeted at large screen tablets. Over Christmas it ground to a halt (due to unexpected demand!?) so i was left with an android tablet that i couldn’t download apps to. Out of frustration and after a bit of a hack i found on t’internet i was able to install Androids Market Place and have all the usual apps available to me. When Appslib eventually came back to life there was sod all on there, this is obviously changing all the time as people start developing more apps specifically for tablets.

It’s pretty speedy for the price (it has a 1Ghz Arm Cortex processor), the screen is very responsive. It does have it moments of laggyness and has hung a couple of times requiring a reset (but to be honest I’m probably not using the most memory friendly of apps).

The screen is great to watch movies on, sound is good too. Using it in portrait mode is a bit meh....the screen just isn’t as crisp.

All in all im please with my little Tablet and id definitely recommend it to fans of the Android OS and those who just want a decent priced tablet to play with, without having to fork out for an iPad.