Back in August 2012, French tablet manufacturer Archos unveiled a tablet called the Archos 101 XS which offered a bundled coverboard which doubled as a snap-on keyboard. The device does look a lot like the Surface tablet which prompted us to ask whether a Windows RT version would not be released at some point.

The device binds a fibre casing to a metal frame allowing it to offer a chassis that’s only 8mm thick. The magnetic coverboard acts as a dock and stand for the tablet as well and is a mere 5mm thick. Check out the review of the Archos 101 XS tablet that we published in August 2012.

Ebuyer sells it for only £260, a ten per cent discount off its suggested retail price. Other features include a dual-core TI OMAP system-on-chip clocked at 1.5GHz, with 1GB of RAM, 16GB onboard storage, a microSD card slot, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, a 10.1in 1,280x800 resolution, a HD webcam, GPS, a battery life of eight ours, USB 2.0 and mini HDMI out.

It’s worth mentioning that the Ebuyer keyboard appears to be an AZERTY rather than a QWERTY one plus the GPU on the chipset is a PowerVR SGX544 model. At 600g, the Archos Gen 10XS is a skinny tablet and according to the review that Riyad Emeran wrote back then, comes with a good codec support and will work well in laptop mode.