Archos GamePad — a 7-inch tablet, a potential game-changer?

Whine. Here’s another toy hoping to become the “gaming peripheral of the future”. The recently-announced and originally-titled Archos GamePad is a 7-inch touchscreen Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich rocking tablet with physical controls for gaming built-in. Also, it’s priced under €150. Do you want this, or even need it? Let’s delve into what makes the GamePad tick.

Casually gaming

It’s an Android tablet through and through, with sticky little controls thrown in for good effort. And just know that if you need to, you can access everything internet related on this Frankenstein machine. And then there’s the hardware: A capacitive 7-inch screen, dual-core 1.5Ghz CPU and a weedy Mali GPU. So far, so bad. Mali in fact, is like the default Intel GPU thrown onto most low-specced machines. It simply exists.

Other specs include 8GB of storage, with a MicroSD slot that can handle up to 64GB of storage. Finally, an HDMI port lets the you output to a nice, juicy flat-screen TV. Is this the death-knell for Ouya, the Android-based console first seen on Kickstarter? We hope so, cause it’s a damn stupid concept.

Here’s the magic though. The GamePad’s going to have “automatic game recognition”. So every Android game will simply adapt to the new control scheme. Now that’s a game changer. The Archos GamePad launches simultaneously in US and Europe come October.