7-inch Archos ChildPad with Android ICS costs just $129, arrives at the end of March

Vlad Bobleanta  By on 02 Mar 12

Every phone and tablet maker out there is constantly trying to invent new niches – and fill them with its own offerings. This though is different. Archos is now trying to get into the ‘tablet for kids’ niche, which in itself is very young at the moment. Furthermore, the French company is actually quite smart in how it approached this, and may see some success with its new strategy.

The Archos ChildPad is a 7-inch Android-powered tablet that comes with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich preinstalled. It’s obviously aimed at children, and one of the most interesting things about it is that it doesn’t come with the Android Market. Whereas that would be an instant turn off for many would-be tablet owners in general, in this particular case that’s actually a very good thing. See, the ChildPad ships with the Kids App Store powered by AppsLib, which contains 10,000 apps filtered as being safe for use by children. And it has parental controls and safe Web browsing built-in.

So you get the absolute latest version of the Android OS, plus the peace of mind that your kid won’t install who-knows-what inappropriate app from the Market or stumble upon ‘dangerous’ websites. And all that for $129.

So, you’re thinking, Archos probably saved quite a bit on hardware. Well, yes and no. Yes – the ChildPad has a 1 GHz single-core processor, but no – since it comes with 1 GB of RAM (that’s double the amount found in Archos’ highest-end G9 line of tablets, inexplicably). While for you and me a 1 GHz single-core CPU simply wouldn’t cut it in this day and age, something tells me your kid won’t mind all that much.

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