Archos announced the GamePad way back in August 2012, but has now shown off a working model at CES in Las Vegas. Pocket-lint was on hand to have a play.

Taking on the PS Vita and the Nintendo 3DS, the GamePad is reminiscent of the ill-fated Xperia Play, aka the PlayStation phone, and is basically a 7-inch tablet with dedicated games controls and buttons either side of the screen.

The GamePad runs a 1.5Ghz processor with a Mali 400mp quad-core GPU to handle the graphics side of things, which means it's fairly fast. Although there was a lack of decent games to push the limits of the tablet on the device we played with at the show, we were able to play a couple of platformers.

Finding the right game shouldn't be an issue though. Unlike some earlier Archos tablets, the new model is also Google certified, so you get access to the Google Play store, and that means you'll get thousands of games that will work - although you will need to spend five minutes at the start mapping the keys to the in-game controls if the developer hasn't coded it.

To do that is simply a case of dragging and dropping the command from a list and then pressing the corresponding button around the edge. Easy.

The controls are as responsive as you would expect, although we were very disappointed with the quality of the screen. The resolution isn't high enough and the colour vibrancy was very washed out. There is also the issue that when you aren't playing games you've got a device that is considerably larger than it needs to be.

Coming in the next couple of weeks we've been told, the £130 Android tablet does offer something different from just a touchscreen experience, but with devices like the Nvidia Sheild and the Razer gaming tablet the GamePad will have challengers.