Archos 97 titanium HD Pro Reviews

"HD is on it, but not in it". This might describe the sobering impression that Archos' 97 Titanium HD made in our tests. Of course, the tablet is a real eye-catcher. It is slim, well-built and the aluminum chassis does not only make a stylish but a robust impression. And nevertheless, it was not really fun using Archos' 97 Titanium, powered by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system. The nice exterior already starts to crumble when turning on the device for the first time. The 9.7 inch screen with a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels makes a good impression at first glance. The colors are bright, the contrast is agreeably crisp, and the capacitive touchscreen is very responsive. However, the brightness rates could be better. Everything is fine up to this point. The tragedy begins when the user wants to set up the tablet via, for example, apps from Google's Play Store. Being a proud user of a HD capable tablet, we of course selected the corresponding HD mode only to quickly find out that the screen cannot properly display a simple search in Google's Play Store. It flickers, dithers and nothing works. The tragedy continues when an app or game is ultimately installed from Google's Play Store using the screen's normal mode. HD mode on and start the game - only to discover that the screen refuses to work by displaying massive flickering. Not even the undemanding game Angry Birds runs. Downloading the latest firmware did not help here either. We will shortly look closer at a second, identical test model and update the test results accordingly.