Tablet with more storage and less cost is a win-win for consumers

With their ease of use, portability, and low cost, tablets remain a hot category. How hot? Gartner reported that in 2010 there were 17.6 million tablets sold, but they expect 2011 sales to skyrocket to 69.5 million units.

So it was only a matter of time before a tablet maker would make their products even more appealing to consumers by offering additional storage onboard for content-rich media or running more powerful applications. Today ARCHOS did just that by being the first to deliver a new family of tablets with a hard drive.

And not just any hard drive of course, but Seagate’s 250GB Momentus Thin, which is a perfect high-capacity complement for the cutting-edge speed of the ARCHOS G9 series of tablets equipped with dual-core 1.5 GHz processors. With 250GB of capacity, the Momentus Thin provides eight times more storage than a standard 32GB tablet, but at the same cost, making the ARCHOS G9 one of the tablet industry’s best cost-performance values.

And if you want even more storage flexibility for your mobile devices, Seagate last month announced the GoFlex Satellite mobile wireless storage device, the first battery-powered external hard drive to wirelessly extend the storage capacity of any Wi-Fi enabled mobile device including tablets. With 500GB and Wi-Fi access over 802.11 b/g/n and a rechargeable battery, GoFlex Satellite enables users of tablets and other ultra-portables to carry an entire library of video, music, pictures and documents.

It’s certainly an interesting time in the marketplace with so many choices and new feature-rich tablets emerging that deliver performance closer to notebook PCs, but with more convenient portability. Check out the ARCHOS tablets and let us know what you think!