Budget 7- and 8-inch Android tablets coming from Archos

Archos is gunning for the more budget-sensitive crowd with the 7-inch “Archos 7 Home Tablet” running Android atop a 600MHz ARM9 CPU due in April for around $179.

The lower-powered CPU ought to be good for some nice, long battery life and the tablet is capable of basic web browsing and 720p video playback across a wide variety of codecs.

You can check out 8:35 of pure ebullience from one of Archos’ biggest fans, Charbax:

The tablet will be available in capacities of 2GB and 8GB, priced at 149 Euro and 179 Euro, respectively. Charbax says that US pricing for the 2GB version should be around $179 “because European countries have more taxes they don’t just convert Euro prices to US Dollar prices.”

Also announced was an 8-inch tablet/digital photo frame, the “Archos 8 Home Tablet,” which the company positions as “a product that can be used as a digital picture frame and as a mobile video player or Internet browser.” Sounds like it may be a photo frame with a (hopefully) rechargeable battery and some online-centric bells and whistles. It’ll be available in May in a 4GB capacity for 149 Euro, which will likely mean $179 in the US considering the Archos 7 also starts at 149 Euro and has been confirmed by Charbax to cost $179 US.

Not a whole lot of info yet, but these things are just starting to spill out. Archos has also said that it’ll be rolling out a range of new products sized between 3 and 10 inches and based on ARM Cortex CPUs up to 1GHz throughout the summer.

[via UMPC Portal and ArchosFans.com]

Press Release (translated from German)