Archos 80 Helium 4G review

The Archos 80 Helium 4G is very cheap indeed for a 4G-enabled tablet, but its looks suit its low price. With its thick, white bezels it looks like a decade-old digital photo frame. It also weighs a chunky 430g, so holding the tablet one-handed soon becomes tiresome.

We also weren’t fond of the two-tone silver and cheap-feeling white plastic back. There’s only 8GB of internal storage and out of the box only 6GB is left, so you’ll most likely need to expand capacity sooner rather than later; the tablet has a microSD card slot so you can add cards with up to 64GB capacity.

The tablet’s Micro USB port also supports USB on-the-go (OTG) so you can also attach an external USB flash drive for more storage. You’ll need to pick up a USB OTG cable separately, however (around £4 from http://cpc.farnell.com). There are slots for a microSD card and a 4G SIM hidden behind a plastic flap on the rear.The tablet’s Micro USB port, headphone jack, power button and volume rocker are all located on the same side. When held in landscape the headphone jack and Micro USB port’s placement could prove annoying as they’re right where your left hand will naturally want to be when you hold the tablet.

The Helium’s 8in screen was underwhelming. Its paltry resolution of 1,024×768 gives it a low pixel density of just 160ppi, so text appears soft and images lack presence. Our colour calibrator found the tablet’s colour accuracy wanting, with the display only able to produce 60.5% of the sRGB colour gamut. This is a very poor score, and we also weren’t particularly impressed with the tablet’s contrast ratio of 824:1.

The screen had a notable blue cast, and this was confirmed by our calibration software, which showed blues to be over-saturated. We’ve seen substantially cheaper tablets with much higher quality displays, so this was disappointing. We measured black levels as 0.36cd/m2, which is an average level, so at least blacks will be more black than grey. As there’s no ambient light sensor you’ll need to adjust brightness manually; we found the screen was usable outdoors at maximum brightness.

The tablet’s rear-facing speaker produce a very tinny sound which lacks any bass presence. It was also not very loud, so, as with most tablets, headphones are vital for watching video or listening to music.

The Helium 4G is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 MSM8926 system-on-chip (SoC), which uses a quad-core Cortex A7 processor running at 1.2GHz. This is paired with 1GB of RAM. This is very much an entry-level SoC, so we weren’t expecting the best performance. Even bearing this in mind, we were still disappointed with the tablet’s browser performance. The tablet took 1,589ms to complete the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, which is slow by current standards. The tablet didn’t feel responsive when browsing complex websites, and there’s a noticeable delay between flicking on the screen and the tablet scrolling.

The Snapdragon 400 MSM8926 uses an Adreno 305 graphics chip, and it’s no powerhouse. In our Ice Storm Extreme test the tablet registered a score of just 2,813 and in Ice Storm Unlimited it managed 4,592. Even the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 6, which is less than half the price of the Helium 4G, managed scores of 6,240 and 10,305. You’re only going to get by with lighter gaming, such as Plants vs Zombies; otherwise the tablet will struggle with anything more graphically intensive.

We were pleasantly surprised by the Archos 80 Helium 4G’s rear-facing 5-megapixel camera (there’s a 2-megapixel model on the front). In our outdoor test shots it managed to produce sharp and detailed images. Colour accuracy was also impressive, and there was minimal noise even in shadow details. Low-light performance wasn’t as good with images showing a substantial amount of noise, but images are still very respectable for a tablet camera.

The Helium 4G runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, which is now quite old, especially with Android 5.0 Lollipop rolling out. Archos hasn’t changed the stock Android experience and we were particularly pleased to see some restraint when it came to pre-installed apps. Archos Video and Archos Music are installed, but there’s little else to get in the way. Archos Music and Archos Video allow you to access media on connected SMB media servers as well as play local music and videos.

It’s unusual to find a 4G tablet for just £200, but that still doesn’t make the Archos Helium 4G a bargain. We’d rather save £80, buy the far superior Tesco Hudl2 and use our phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot.