6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
Should be awesome, but isn't
Date of Review: Dec 23, 2007
The Bottom Line: Did not meet expectations or marketing hype
This really should be a great product: WiFi, 800 px video, video podcasts, web browsing, direct content download, all your music, pictures, video in one place. Sounds awesome, right. Well not exactly. Here's the bad news...
-Wifi is VERY flaky. It could connect to my router, but didn't like my linksys range extender.
-Syncs playlists with windows media player 11. But the playlists are empty! When you try to launch the playlist file from its resident folder, the whole unit crashes. This was a deal breaker for me. With 1000's of songs and playlists created by thematic moods, I really didn't want to recreate them on the device with no way to automatically keep them synced. For a "gen5" device, this is inexcusable.
-Archos content store has very little content. Marketing for the this device highlights this feature, but there is nothing interesting to download.
-They also push the idea of being able to customize the device with opera widgets. Unfortunately, there are less than a dozen that work on the Archos. And you can't even add your own feeds to the news reader widget.
-Sound quality is pretty bad. I am no audiophile, but even I could hear the difference between the Archos and my Zen Micro. The sound seems very quiet and not full. The equalizer makes very little impact on the sound. I can barely tell the difference.
I'm still in search of a non-ipod-non-zune pmp. This device is all hype and did not meet my expectations.
