The Archos 5 pains me in the sense that I can see there is a great device in here somewhere; whether that device will ever surface remains to be seen.
First, I will start with the positives. If you’re into movies, the Archos 5 is for you. The expansive 4.8″ screen is a joy to watch movies on, and supports a fairly wide gamut of formats out of the box, and it supports videos up to full DVD resolution (720×480), which results in a gorgeous, ultra-crisp picture on this “small” screen. Touch-screen navigation during video watching is fairly simple, intuitive, and thoughtful – you can set bookmarks, or pause a scene and use it as your wallpaper. When it comes down to it, video is where this player shines through. For music, the main feature on this Archos is ability to play many different formats – including wav, flac, mp3, ogg, and wma. Sound quality is pretty good. The user interface is fairly slick in the browsing of music and videos as well, I especially like the previews it displays next to each video file.
The positives really end there, because for all the features the 5 has, most of them do not work as advertised or have way too many bugs to be considered truly useable.
-One thing that irked me right out of the box was the lack of the inclusion of a charger. The only method of charging included is the USB cable which takes a whopping eight(!) hours to charge the 5 fully. Archos also has a compulsion to nickel and dime you for everything. $20 for a charger. $20 for a plugin for a couple of extra file formats. Ridiculous. With the price these things end up costing, you really might as well buy a netbook with a high capacity hard drive. It will probably do all the things the 5 does much cheaper, better, and with a larger screen.
-The 5’s touchscreen can be very frustrating at times. Whether you like it or not, the iPod Touch has become the gold standard among touchscreen devices, and one thing I will say is that the Touch has an extremely easy to use, responsive screen. The 5 does not. It is not very responsive at all, and often requires multiple taps. And by taps and I mean very very hard presses – almost as hard as if I was trying to press a button. Extremely disappointing, but still useable; sometimes it works very smoothly.
-The user interface, while well designed and effective in many areas, falls flat. My main gripe is the menu screen. There are six items permanently located in the menu, only three of which I actually use (“Play,” “Internet,” and “Tools.”). There is even an icon solely for pushing all the add-ons Archos produces for the 5. I would appreciate the option to rearrange/customize the menu, or at the very least be able to remove items from it. Just looking at all the junk on the menu has become irritating. Also, when listening to music, there is no way to quickly return to the “Artists” or “albums” list – the only thing available is a “back” button that will take you through multiple screens when tapped- first of the album you are currently listening to, then the artist’s list of albums, then the artist list, then the main music menu. it becomes quite annoying. Browsing of FLAC files (as of firmware 1.3.05) is currently poorly integrated; when browsing through the music library/list of albums, album art will not display (they’ll display when you actually play the music though).
-Perhaps the biggest disappointment is the misleading advertising of this device as an ‘internet media tablet.’ You would think that with a name like that, the browsing experience would be flawless. While it is better than most, it definitely should be advertised as an extra and not a main selling point. The 5 loads pages fast most of the time but gets poor wi-fi reception and drops the signal where other wi-fi devices (PS3, laptop, etc.) do not. The Flash 9 experience is not as full-featured as they would have you believe. Heavily flash-dependent sites such as hulu will not even work. Scrolling with your finger is laggy and horrible. It has nice tabbed browsing and is able to run a few tabs without a real choke though. One strange thing is no address bar – URLs are entered through a separate menu, resulting in more unnecessary taps. Tapping links is also difficult because of the innacuracy of the touchscreen combined with the lack of hilighting of links, so it is difficult to tell what you are actually clicking on.
-The integrated speaker is one of the worst things I have ever heard. It’s passable for viewing videos but horrendous with music. It’s not that big of a deal though, because most of the time I use headphones. But if you are the kind of person who intends on using the speaker a lot, then please be aware of its awfulness.
-The firmware is actually downright buggy too. It freezes up often while using the mail application and shuts down and restarts sometimes while browsing the internet. Sometimes after watching a video for an extended period of time, I try to tap the screen and nothing will come up, forcing me to shut the 5 down and restart it.
From reading my review, you would think I would have rated it lower. I gave it three stars because like I said, there is a great PMP somewhere in here and Archos can fix most of the 5’s shortcomings with new firmware. The 5 just feels half-baked as of now, and Archos should have taken more time with it before releasing it.
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Tags: Archos 5 120 GB, Archos 5 Series, Internet Media Tablet