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The GamePad 2 works well as a device for watching movies and connecting to the TV via the HDMI Out gives a good quality picture. As with games, anything animated looks the most impressive because of the depth of colours that the GamePad 2 offers.
Archos has included a media centre app that houses and categorises all of the onboard multimedia and makes it available for streaming over Wi-Fi. If you're new to streaming content to multiple devices without a smart TV, which takes away most of the hassle, you might find this a bit fiddly. You'll need a media centre like Chromecast or WD TV for it to work properly.
The app doesn't provide much in the way of an explanation or wizard to guide you through the process, so you may spend some time Googling what to do. When you do get it to work, it's seamless and there's no lag. The GamePad streams in 1080p so films look excellent.
The Archos music app has the same functionality as the media centre app. It stores and categorises your music and makes it available for streaming. It's pretty basic outside of those features and doesn't offer anything new to listening to your music. For managing your music, the Google Play app is much better.
The GamePad 2 is powerful enough to support a good Chrome browsing experience. Pages load quickly over Wi-Fi and they're responsive to touch commands. There's no lag or stuttering and resizing pages is smooth. As you would expect, flash is not supported.
Archos claims that it has improved on the previous GamePad's battery by 50%. It's advertised as 10.5 hours and I managed to get around 9 hours on and off gaming out of it throughout a day. This will obviously vary depending on what type of game you're playing.
If you're using it casually, as in playing and pausing games without turning the device off and returning to it later, you should be able to get a couple days use out of it. From a completely empty battery it takes about two hours to charge.
The GeekBench 3 benchmarking test came back with a single-core score of 454 and multi-core score of 1147, which, despite this being a supposedly high-performance gaming tablet, are actually lower scores than the Nexus 5 got with a single-core score of 917 and multi-core score of 2760.
