This is my third Archos. I had an iRiver which was only nice until I saw the Archos 605 wifi. As nice as that one was I saw the new Archos 5 in a side by side video booting up, playing a video and loading a web page. It was vastly better so I bought it and loved it. When I saw this one I didn’t wait to get it. Mine arrived 1 week ago as I write this. I sold my 605 because my wife didn’t want it. I’m keeping the old 5 because it’s not worth selling when I can use as a second unit. My wife doesn’t want it either, but she wants one of these! I will compare to the previous version but I want to introduce what I think shines and also respond to some clueless posts here.
First of all there is no other device like this anywhere. My PC has a Quad Athlon 64 CPU with 8 GB RAM running 64 bit Linux. The Archos loads web pages in most cases faster than my PC! Looking at a Zune? The Archos 800×480 has 2.94 times as many pixels as the Zune’s 480×272, but that’s only half the story because the 4.8 inch screen has double the pixel density of the 3.3 on the Zune. Don’t even ask about ipods. My BlackBerry 8900 has more pixels. Pop up a video and marvel at a screen so good you will forget you’re looking at a handheld device. I have my old unit in the dock to watch on TV, but I actually prefer this one in hand. (My old one is 250 GB and bulky) The browser in this unit renders pages correctly that the old one munches up at 800 pixels and with the continuous zoom and intelligent column handling it’s way easier to read.
Someone mentioned it weighs as much as a PSP? Bzzt! Wrong again. I showed mine to a guy with a PSP and he held them both and asked me to check out that his PSP weighed twice as much. He said it suddenly seemed like a brick. When I told him I didn’t have to transcode videos to play them and could do MKV he was blown away. Here’s a tip. Forget that there are a few bugs and just go out in public with this unit. Everyone who saw it started asking questions and all my friends were incredibly jealous, even after I had to reboot it in front of one of them. Battery life is also excellent as after a few charges I managed all day usage out of this playing with it. On top of that wifi is so good that I get at least 10%-20 more range on my portable hot spot than I do with my BlackBerry or my old Archos 5. I also got 7 satellites locked in the middle of my house using the free Android YGPS software I downloaded.
The very cool part that drew me to this was Android integration. There are a few caveats. Android is still fairly new, but growing fast and integrating media center programs with a phone layer in a device that doesn’t have a phone is an extremely ambitious project… and let’s be clear. Nobody else is even close to this! That said there are Android programs that need work, which is not chiefly an Archos problem. When something crashes it pops up a dialog and asks if you want to kill it or let it try to recover a little longer. One frustration is some programs not offered on the AppsLib require a photo barcode reader to download and seem to behave as if they are not sure what the device is, but I expect that to improve as it gains popularity and gets more interaction.
One thing people complain about is that the browser doesn’t do Flash. Uh, yeah… show me a PMP that does Flash. That’s right, the last generation of Archos. Now try to view Flash 10. Right, doesn’t work. That’s why a bunch of companies partnered together on the Open Screen project with Adobe. Guess what. Adobe and Google hoped to have it out by now but it’s just in beta. Wow! It must be software! Being as I develop software I know about things taking longer than you hope. However the TI chip in this unit was specifically designed to be able to make short work of Flash 10. The Webkit browser is nicer than the Opera browser in the last unit and this unit will still run flash, just not integrated into the browser. Given that the new software should be ready in 2-3 months you can hardly blame Archos for not investing huge effort to hack flash 9 into the browser.
I am not surprised this unit is less than perfect. Some of the flames directed at Archos are really infantile. They are a small but growing company. Companies with no less financial clout that Microsoft are notorious for releasing software that has numerous promised features removed, can’t run piles of software from previous releases and ships to PC companies with dozens of pages of known bugs. All that while making far less internal change than promised. This unit is a huge jump. I have had mine for a week. It has frozen up on me a few times. It depends on what I’m doing. Some things crash it more easily. It would be nice if it were more fully debugged, but having released software I found that no matter how thoroughly I tested customers found bugs I didn’t. Early adopters of bleeding edge hardware running custom software are going to experience higher than usual bugs. Get over it! One day you flip it on and it loads a great firmware update and all is happy. And for the guy who said he didn’t have wifi… spend [...] man! You can download the upgrade and manually install it, but that is less satisfying for browsing the web.
Everything the previous unit did this one does better, except play Flash video, but the last one was not as good at browsing the web as they promised… which never took away from it being great as a media player and excellent on HDTV browsing the web with the dock. Would I like to have this unit now or wait until Adobe finishes Flash for Android and Archos smooths out more bugs? Hell yes I want it now! I’d like to see the tether work, flash and some other things, and I’m sure I will soon.
There is a prevailing foolishness today that people, when handed a [...] gold piece with a small scratch on it, will trade it for a shiny new quarter and imagine they achieved empiric victory by acquiring inferior goods over imperfect superior goods. If you like to complain so much you can’t enjoy an imperfect world have someone buy this for you for Christmas. That way they have no more than a few weeks of you complaining before Adobe let’s you watch Hulu… which will look like crap on a Zune and nothing at all on an iphone. There is nothing like an Archos. If I have to reboot this thing once every few hours to have a unit that’s 97% perfect months before it is flawless those months are money well spent in happy exploration of the most awesome handheld device yet.
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Tags: Archos 5 32 GB, Archos 5 Series, Internet Media Tablet