Archos to soon introduce its first smartphones, Galaxy S III look-alike will take flagship role

Archos is a company you probably know mostly for its affordable Android tablets, but that is about to change soon as the manufacturer will deliver its first smartphones in April. Archos has chosen Android as the platform for its new smartphone series and kick it off with three devices launching at once.

The most interesting one is a Galaxy S III look-alike, the Archos 48 Platinum, a flagship device with a 4.8-inch IPS display with a 800 x 1,280-pixel resolution and the popular MediaTek MT6589 chipset with a 1.7GHz quad-core processor. The best thing about the Archos 48 Platinum is its price - it will only cost 249 euro (around $335) at launch, which is slightly more than a third of other flagship devices. The device will run on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

Of course, the quad-core MT6589 is not quite on par with the Exynos 4412, but nonetheless its a pretty impressive chip for its price. Performance is expected to be around 50% to 60% of that of the Samsung device. The flagship Archos 48 Platinum will go on sale in May.

Next on the list is the Archos 52 Titanium, a 5.2-inch Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich-based smartphone. It will obviously be an even more affordable solution given its 480 x 800-pixel display and dual-core 1.2GHz processor with 512MB of RAM. There is no info on its price yet though.

Finally, Archos will also ship a purely low-end device in the form of the Archos 35 Carbon. This smartphone will feature a 3.5-inch 320 x 480-pixel screen, a single-core 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and 512MB of internal storage (expandable via microSD cards). The Archos 35 Carbon will run on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and cost only 90 euro (around $120) at launch.

source: Hi-Tech