Archos Gamepad 2 review

Android should be a great platform for handheld gaming; there’s plenty of games on the Play store and the open nature of the operating system means you can easily emulate classic consoles too. Archos tried to capitalise on this with the Archos Gamepad, but unfortunately it fell short with poor performance, unresponsive controls and a basic screen. The company has learned from its mistakes, and produced the Gamepad 2.

Like its predecessor, the Gamepad 2 is a 7in Android tablet with a full set of gaming controls bolted to either side of the screen, except Archos has overhauled almost every part of the new model. The larger, concave analogue sticks are now more like Nintendo’s 3DS sliders than Sony’s stubby PSP analogue nub and are more comfortable on the thumbs. Two extra trigger buttons let you play more advanced games, the D-pad and face buttons feel much more responsive, and the new black finish is much prettier than the dull grey of the first model, too.

The 7in screen sits between the two banks of gaming buttons. The 1,280×800 resolution display may not match the clarity of the 1080p Nexus 7, but text and images still look reasonably sharp and it’s almost impossible to spot individual pixels from a regular viewing distance. A peak brightness of 290.76cd/m2 is slightly on the low side, to the point that we struggled to see what was happening onscreen when out in bright sunlight, but indoors it coped reasonably well with light reflections. Colour accuracy was impressive too, with great contrast that gave depth to darker images.

The pair of front-firing stereo speakers are awkwardly placed below the analogue sticks, and you’ll almost certainly block them when playing games. With a tight grip, you can end up muffling the sound badly. When they aren’t obstructed, they produce impressively loud audio, although there’s barely any bass and the high-end sounds rather sharp. It sounds best when the volume is reduced to less than two-thirds of maximum, but for long gaming sessions we’d suggest you use headphones.

An HDMI output is a welcome inclusion for anyone looking to play games on a bigger screen, but unfortunately the Gamepad 2 uses a Mini HDMI output and doesn’t include an adaptor in the box. There are also Micro USB and 3.5mm audio inputs on the top of the device, along with Miracast wireless display and Bluetooth for pairing wireless accessories.

With only 8GB or 16GB of internal storage, depending on the model, you’ll almost certainly want to add a microSD card once you start downloading games, and the microSD card slot is conveniently placed at the bottom of the device. Annoyingly there’s no way to set apps to install to the memory card by default, so you have to move each one manually after installing it to the tablet. Some apps can’t be moved at all, and will only run from the tablet itself.

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.