Archos Gamepad 2 review

The Gamepad 2 uses an ARM Cortex A9 CPU, which has four cores running at 1.6GHz, and 2GB of RAM. The processor is powerful enough to run Android smoothly, and the home screen and app drawer showed no obvious signs of slowdown. The Gamepad 2 completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 1230.6ms, which is on par with other tablets in the same price range. However, Gamepad 2’s Mali 400 graphics chip looks somewhat underpowered for a device primarily meant for gaming. A 3D Mark Ice Storm Unlimited score of 4063 is less than half that of a Nexus 7, and some of the more challenging 3D games such as Real Racing 3 suffered from a choppy frame rate. However, we saw smooth frame rates on almost all of the retro games we tried.

With a 50 per cent larger battery than its predecessor, we expected the Gamepad 2 to last longer in our video rundown test, but were still impressed when it managed to last 10 hours and five minutes. That’s more than twice as long as the original Gamepad, and almost on par with a Nexus 7. Naturally the battery will drain more quickly if you spend most of your time gaming, but we managed to get between six and seven hours of use when playing 3D titles.

Like the original Gamepad, Archos has opted not to add a rear-facing camera to the Gamepad 2. We think this is a good move, as it helps reduce cost of the tablet down as much as possible. You still get a front-facing webcam, but the 1.3-megapixel sensor is only useful for video chats as it captured very grainy snapshots.

With a near-stock version of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean at its core, the Gamepad 2’s only major addition is the gamepad icon in the menu bar, which lets you map the hardware buttons to any game that uses virtual onscreen controllers. It works well, with only a tiny delay between pressing a button and the action being completed, and it made games that are awkward to play using a touchscreen far easier to control.

Archos has also included several preinstalled games along with the Archos Music and Archos apps. Conveniently, these include UPnP media streaming from any networked PC or NAS device. Refreshingly, you’re able to uninstall or disable most of the preinstalled apps, freeing up space for the ones you actually want.

The Gamepad 2 is a definite improvement on its predecessor, but it still struggles with fiddly controls that aren’t suited to certain genres. Performance is improved but is still lacking compared to similarly priced tablets, and you could buy a Tegra 4-powered Advent Vega Tegra Note and a Bluetooth controller for less. Even so, if you want an all-in-one device that can play games, the Gamepad 2 is still your only option.