When it works, it offers the best portable video player, radio, and web surfing device in the world. But it is like a jaguar car, looks pretty but keeps breaking down. I am returning it for a refund because I can't let my wife or kids use a device that will freeze when they try to watch a movie all the time. Bottom Line: it freezes just enough that you don't trust it to work every time and you will hear, why did you buy this it doesn't work!
Good things about the device: The big screen and decent speakers are a joy to use for watching movies, listening to local talk radio, and surfing and viewing all my favorite news and blogging sites. The web radio plug-in is actually super cool, pretty much every station on the planet is listed and easy to find. My video collection works including some of the hi-definition as long as it is 720p DIVX XVID. You have to convert 720p MKV (I do WMV 2500 bitrate 720p) and that takes an entire day for my computer to do - so start it after dinner and it is done the next day when you get home from work. Mine sits snugly in a Noreve leather case which looks great and doesn't show the finger prints. It is the best portable movie experience you can imagine. The 720p content looks perfect, especially the newer animated movies - wow! The kickstand is very useful.
Bad things - the viewing angle when you tilt it away and you are lower than the screen washes out, all other angles are good. This will be a problem if you have a night stand and watch, you have to make the screen level to see it clearly. Most other situations it isn't an issue. Finally, the freezing. I have this thing freeze every hour on me, no joke. It doesn't freeze as much if I start a movie and leave it alone, those times it is great. But I am a multi-tasker and that is where it fails. I watch part of a movie, then want to skip ahead and it freezes. Hold the Power 10 seconds and reboot. Often, daily, I will get a FAT error when this happens so you can't do anything and I have to reboot five times to clear it. I have also tried changing it to hard drive mode and running scandisk with both boxes checked for the long one, and defragment. I've tried holding volume up and rebooting and re-running the firmware. Last, I have tried clearing temp cache and full reinitialization. Full reinitialization only erased one plug in - the free web plugin, so I had to drag it back and run an update. Also I had to go to Archos FTP to restore my system backgrounds. No matter what I do, the wrong touch press in web or movie will cause it to freeze. It seems to happen more often on the high definition videos. Another minor issue is that I get some stuttering and out of sync audio/video on high def but it often corrects itself.
My recommendation is to not buy this product and wait and see if Archos comes out with a new one in 7 inches. I have two 605s and they both work fine but have issues of their own. The 605 160gb hard drive has loud pops when wifi connected and the headpones are in (using the mini dock lessens it somewhat to a usable level but still present and annoying) and the 605 4gb flash sometimes has a faint high pitched sound coming from the device hard drive I guess and it has always had it but otherwise works perfect.
Last note: I had to send two of these back for broken hard drives, they made a loud buzz saw sound when turning on. So in all I am sending three back. I will be losing all my plug-in money and the case is now a waste, I decided taking the loss was better than keeping a product that freezes but I otherwise would love. If you do get it, try just using standard definition divx files and accept you won't be watching the 720p stuff and it might be less so.Get more detail about
Archos 7 160 GB Internet Media Tablet.
