Archos Quietly Launches 10s Netbook

They’re baaaaack. And we’re not just talking about that Win 7 tablet we saw today. Archos, whom we haven’t heard from on the computing front since it released the Archos 10 (with a resounding thud) early this year, has quietly launched another netbook, the $399 10s. The good news is that it has a sleeker design: while the 10 had a matte black interior with a flat putty-colored lid to match, the 10s has a cleaner-looking white keyboard (not unlike Samsung’s netbooks), which seems expanded in size, too. Unfortunately, Archos pulled an HP when it decided to flank the touchpad with the buttons. The specs, meanwhile, remain predictable: an Atom 270 CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet. It’s also running XP Home, an interesting choice given that Windows 7 is about to launch, complete with Starter edition for netbooks. Archos says it wants to see if this hardware set can handle Win 7. Its Atom-powered 9 tablet, though, runs Win 7. And we (along with other tech journalists) have discovered that the OS runs just fine on netbooks. The Archos 10, as well as the new 9 tablet, comes with more bundled software than most, including Lotus Symphony for word processing, Archos Media Club, and BitDefender security. Again I ask: is that worth buying the Archos 10 over another netbook? If you’re interested, the Archos 10s costs $399 and will be available for sale in mid-October.