While owners of the 80 and 101 G9 tablets patiently wait for the update to Ice Cream Sandwich, Archos has announced a very cheap, child-friendly tablet that will run Android 4.0 out of the box.
The new Child Pad costs just $129, or likely around £99 here, and runs the very latest version of Android. From the render above, we can see that the Child Pad resembles the G9 series of tablets, albeit with a brighter and more youth-friendly sky blue and white finish.
It features a 7-inch touchscreen, 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, making it a capable tablet when it comes to browsing the web, emailing and even playing most games. However, unlike Archos’ G9 series of tablets, the Child Pad isn’t Google certified, and therefore will rely on AppsLib for app downloads in the absence of the Android Market. This means that other Google apps like Gmail and Maps will be missing, too, but for $129 you can’t really complain.
Archos has designed a new ‘Kids App Store’ specifically for the product, which is powered by AppsLib and contains over 10,000 child-friendly apps suitable for downloading to the Child Pad. The French manufacturer has also scoured the list of apps and hand-picked 28 of them to have pre-installed on each tablet, including classics Angry Birds and Flight Frenzy.
Kids love to go on the web, and sometimes without the correct measures in place, they’ll end up on websites that you wish they hadn’t seen. Archos recognises this, and has designed the Child Pad’s web browser to be safer. Mobile Parental Filter controls can be adjusted easily within the browser before use, which has been rated highly as the most efficient parental control software in the world today.
The Child Pad will go on sale at the end of March for $129, though we’re yet to learn about a UK release date.
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