Archos unveils gaming-centric GamePad 2 tablet

Android device maker Archos has unveiled its newest gaming-centric tablet—the GamePad 2. The tablet will be launched in Europe by the end of October for £179.99, which roughly translates to Rs 18,000. It will be making its way to Indian shores shortly after. It features a 7-inch IPS display with a widescreen resolution of 1280x800 pixels. This gives it a pixel density of 215 ppi.

To show off its gaming capabilities, Archos is packing in a couple of games with the GamePad 2: racing game Asphalt 8: Airborne and multiplayer-centric FPS Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour. Both games have been modified to work with the GamePad 2’s hardware buttons, which include a couple of analogue sticks, four trigger buttons, a d-pad and six face buttons.

The GamePad 2 has a bunch of buttons for gaming

Under the hood, the GamePad 2 is powered by a Cortex-A9 quad-core ARM processor clocked at 1.6 GHz and a quad-core Mali 400 MP4 GPU. This is coupled with 2GB of RAM to give it the horsepower to handle basically any game currently out on Android. Connectivity options include dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth. If you want to play the tablet’s games on a big screen, you will be pleased to find an HDMI-out port on it.

Out of the box, the tablet runs on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Future updates for the tablet will be available through Archos’ official website. It is available in 8GB and 16GB variants, both of which have microSD card slots that are capable of supporting cards of up to 64GB capacity.