Archos has been rather surprisingly quick to dole out timely updates for its tablet hardware (a fact that certain parties would do well to take not of). After upgrading their 8 and 10-inch 9th generation tablets to Ice Cream Sandwich via a software update, they’re re-releasing the G9 series with ICS straight from retailers. The G9 Turbo tablets will have the latest version of Android right off the shelf, something that very few phones and tablets can say even four months after release.

According to Eurodroid distribution seems limited to the UK at the moment, but given Archos’ French origins, should spread to the rest of Europe soon. The 8-inch Archos 80 G9 Turbo starts at £199 for the 16GB version, with the 32GB version upped to £239. The 101 G9 Turbo starts at £249 for a paltry 8GB, with the 16GB version going for £269. THe hard drive version isn’t available yet, but you could always buy the Honeycomb model and upgrade manually.

It’s great to see Archos supporting its current hardware with software updates, even if we’d like them to roll it out more territories (our UK editors are making nyah-nyah faces across the Atlantic). They aren’t sitting on their haunches when it comes to new hardware, either: the G10 series looks to have both a slim profile and a Transformer-style keyboard dock, in addition to Android 4.0.

[via Phandroid]