??? on 70 vs 101

[heybubb]

I am looking at picking one of these up for my 8 year old. Any input on the better choice would be great.

He will want to play games (so needs flash), use as e-reader, watch movies, etc.

I am still unclear on whether the 70 has been updated to Froyo yet?
Also, do these have the Google Market installed? If not, can they be rooted to have that added?

Again, just looking for some input on the better way to go. He is only 8, so the 70 is preferred from a price standpoint.

Thanks

 

[CarsnGadgets]

the 70 may be a better size for him and is cheaper, but either are fine, as long as he is careful with it.

both the 70 and 101 have 2.1 on them as standard, but 2.2 is downloadable as an update for both, the device will tell you its available when you connect to wifi. or you can download the firmware from archos.com

flash isnt actually supplied by archos yet as the havent been certified by adobe yet, they will release an optimized version as soon as they are though. In the meantime though you can install flash from an apk file found elsewhere.

the Archos come with archos's own appslib app market, not the google one, which only shows apps tested to work with the tablets, but again installing the full google market is easy as just installing a file that can be found on the archosfans forum. gAppsInstaller_v4 - Froyo - xda-developers

Forum.ArchosFans.com - View forum - General Archos Gen8: Archos 28, 32, 43, 70 and 101 Internet Tablets

at the moment they cant be permanently rooted, but you can use the z4root app to temporarily root them.

I would probably recommend the 70 purely on size and price.

 

[Hajile_Ibushi]

Unfortunately, Archos tablets do not come with gorilla glass nor titatium unibody. The pre-requisite when giving anything to a kid.

As for the firmware, i'll have to recommend that you manually download the firmware update for the last Eclair firmware. The Froyo update on has the basic android functionality working and they're still working on getting the archos functions back in. The next firmware update is apparently more stable and more functional than the initial Froyo so i'd recommend to wait for that before updating to 2.2.

Regarding the app market. Google Market is not tied to the OS. It's just a regular app like any other and can be installed without the need to hack the phone. No different from you downloading an exe off the internet and running in on windows (You don't need to hack windows to do that either). There are two different markets however, there's one designed to work with Eclair and another updated one for Froyo. Either one can be installed easilly.