Archos Diamond S: A 5-inch, 4G LTE smartphone that won't lay waste to your savings

Archos probably isn't the first company you'd think of when shopping for a new smartphone, but the French firm is hoping its new Diamond S mobile will tempt shoppers to part with their cash. Read on for everything you need to know.

Powerful tech for less

The Diamond S doesn't offer a particularly unique design or revolutionary software, instead it appears to be offering itself up as a healthy chunk of hardware for not a lot of cash. Specifically, the Diamond S will cost £160 or 230 euros when it goes on sale in the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands in November. There's no word of details on a wider release yet, but that price equates to about $250 or AU$350.

For that relatively low price you get a lot of hardware. The Diamond S has an octa-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz and backed up by 2GB of RAM. It has 16GB of storage, which can be beefed up using a microSD card, while the back plays host to a 16-megapixel camera.

Meanwhile, on the front there's an 8-megapixel front-facing camera, for high-resolution selfies. The phone packs 4G LTE and a 5-inch display with a 1,280x720-pixel resolution. That's not an especially high pixel count, but it should be plenty for messaging, enjoying photos or the odd bit of video streaming.

The Diamond S is running Android version 5.1, which comes packed with all the niceties associated with Google's mobile operating system, notably great integration with Google's email and calendar services, and plenty of apps, movies, TV shows and books to download via Google Play.

Outlook

The Diamond S certainly looks appealing on paper, but with manufacturers of all sizes pumping out ever-cheaper smartphones, it'll have to do something really special to stand out. We'll be going hands-on with the Diamond S at IFA 2015 in Berlin as soon as next week, so stay tuned for hands-on impressions, photos and video. Meanwhile, those in the market for a cheap phone would do well to investigate Motorola's recently revamped and very impressive Moto G.

The Diamond S launches alongside the Archos 50e Helium and 50 Cesium, two 4G LTE phones that are identical, except that one runs Windows while the other offers Android software.