A few companies have already tried to push Android in a laptop/tablet hybrid and now its Archos trying to do something along the same lines. The company today unveiled ArcBook, a 10.1-inch notebook powered by Android. Since most of the products Archos makes are competitively priced this isn’t a high-end affair, so don’t expect any top-tier specifications.
Under the hood there’s a RK3168 Dual-Core ARM Cortez A9 processor clocked at 1.2GHz paired with only 1GB of RAM. Apart from 8GB of onboard storage, a USB 2.0 port and an internal lithium polymer 8,000mAh battery this notebook has a 10.1-inch capacitive multitouch display with 1024×600 pixel resolution. A pretty standard affair that’s not going to top any performance benchmarks.
The ArcBook isn’t trying to do be an Android tablet and a laptop, its not trying to do both things at once. Its a bona fide notebook in the sense that there’s a full QWERTY keyboard attached to the device. It runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and its unlikely that the ArcBook will soon be seeing an upgrade to Android 4.4 KitKat.
Customers get full access to the Google Play Store for apps and 15GB of free Google Drive storage. To aid productivity it comes with Office Suite Pro 6 pre-loaded which lets users edit and create Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. The ArcBook costs $169.99.