An inexpensive device with a great display
The 7" tablet market has grown significantly in recent months, with users much preferring more manageable devices, rather than something that’s 10 inches or more.
Archos has risen to that demand and produced an interesting range of 7" Android tablets, from the GampePad through to the top-of-the range 70b Helium. This Archos 70 Platinum comes in second to the Helium, so you can expect some pretty decent specifications.
It features a quad-core Mediatek MT8127 1.3GHz A7 processor with a Mali 450 GPU and 1GB of memory. You get 16GB of storage, Android 5.0 and a micro-SD card slot to push up the available storage.
The display is an excellent 7" 1024 x 600, IPS five-point capacitive touchscreen that offers a remarkably clear and colourful output. Along the sides we have the power and volume buttons and a micro-USB port for charging. Sadly, there's no mini-HDMI, but that's not unusual at this kind of price.
The 2MP rear camera will provide reasonable photos and video recording. The front facing 0.3MP camera won’t win any resolution awards, but for video calling it’ll work fine.
The Platinum is a fairly svelte device, measuring just 188 x 108 x 10.4mm and weighing 270g. As an everyday tablet, it’s ideal and can be chucked into a jacket pocket or bag without too much fuss. Likewise as an e-reader, the Platinum can be held comfortably for quite some time before it becomes too heavy for a finger tip grip.
In terms of performance, the Platinum is reasonably good. Our GeekBench 3 single-core score was 362, while the multi-core score test was 1,211. This puts it on a performance par with the likes of the Motorola Droid Ultra and Moto X, both of which are fairly good devices. It's also about half the performance of a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 – which is obviously a much more expensive device.
We’ve always liked the fact that Archos tends not to bundle tons of useless apps on any of its Android devices, and this again is true with the Platinum. Very little has been added to Lollipop that has the Archos stamp on it; there’s a media player and that’s it. But you’ll also find Angry Birds, BitDefender Anti-Virus, Jamendo, News Republic and a World of Goo demo, all of which can be removed without too much difficulty.
The Archos 70 Platinum is a good 7" tablet. Its performance is generally above average, the screen is excellent and the price isn’t too bad either. David Hayward
A good all-round tablet with a great display.