The newly unveiled Archos GamePad is just that: a gamepad. Wrapped around a 7-inch Android tablet. With actual gaming buttons and all that.

Archos is rather well known for thinking outside the box (ChildPad, anyone?), and its latest tablet is no exception. The GamePad’s intentions are pretty clear: rule the tablet gaming space. And with its buttons, it may just do that.

The Archos GamePad has a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen of unknown resolution, a dual-core 1.5 GHz processor, a quad-core Mali 400 GPU, 8 GB of built-in storage space, microSD slot, HDMI out, and it runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. That OS version natively supports the gaming buttons, but Archos has also worked with game makers to ensure that about 1,000 well-known games work perfectly with the new setup. And even if your fave game dev hasn’t done anything about this, Archos has you covered by enabling you to map any virtual in-game controls to the physical buttons.

The Archos GamePad will be available at the end of October for €149.

wow. $149 not bad. (prob same in USD as Euros)

I'll still get a Nexus7 and just sync a bluetooth controller though.

Looks cool and at 149 it's also pretty cheap. Too bad I'm not really interested in Android gaming (yet?)

too bad its android based(not that android is bad, but I prefer the games on windows right now). I will get my mobile gaming on when windows 8 tablets come out. Will probably use my xbox controller too.

It'll be very interesting to see if this catches on. Personally I wouldn't pay $150 for it (I'm fine playing on my phone/tablet) but I probably would drop $50.