Archos 605 Wi-Fi Reviewer's Comments
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You don’t want to leave home without the “TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award” winning MP3 and personal media player. The Archos 605 with Wi-Fi is a sleek media player with a high resolution, 4.3 inch touch screen, that can play all your favorite music, movies, television programs, photos and pdf files. And with 160GB of storage space there is always room for more of your favorite digital media.
The only thing keeping this product out of the number one spot is the price. The Archos 605 with Wi-Fi is a little more expensive than the #1 product, iPod Classic , and has a significantly shorter battery life in comparison. Additionally, we felt that to fully utilize all that the Archos 605 offers, you will need to spend more money on additional accessories.
Archos also offers this player in a 30 GB, 60 GB and 80 GB hard drive models and a 4 GB flash model.Archos 605 Wi-Fi Screenshots. Click to Enlarge
Features:
The Archos 605 is a great toy for those that travel frequently or have some extra time to burn. You can upload movies, music and pictures; stream and watch videos from your PC using Wi-Fi, listen to or record radio, and read text documents and PDF files.
Although the Archos 605 includes many great features, we are sad to report that since it is not as well known a brand or MP3 product you have to hunt for compatibility. Additionally, to use the Archos 605 to its fullest potential you need to download additional plug-in software for web browsing, podcasting and some video files.Music Formats:
The Archos 605 supports wide array of music formats including mp3s, unprotected wav, and DRM protected wma files. With an additional software plug-in, the Archos 605 will also support unprotected aac files.
This personal media player will work with most online music stores using Microsoft PlaysforSure wma files. This means you can download music from many popular music stores including Napster, Yahoo! and Rhapsody. However, you cannot use the Archos 605, or any other PlaysforSure portable device, using the iTunes store, unless the song is in MP3 format.Picture Formats:
This personal media player is great for storing you family photos, vacation pictures, holiday memories and more. The Archos 605 is compatible with jpg, bmp and png photo formats. With 160GB of memory you could potentially hold one million photographs in the palm of your hand. Additionally, this is one of the few players we reviewed that supported pdf files. Now, you can download a book through Wi-Fi and read it using the pdf reader.
Video Formats:
Although the Archos 605 supports the usual video formats like mpeg-4, avi and wmv (Windows Media Video) we would have liked to have seen support for divx and xvid. However, the formats it does support are common and should do you just fine.
Archos has a working relationship with CinemaNow and Amazon UnBox, which allows you to purchase videos from these services and download them to your portable.Physical Features:
As far as MP3 players go, the Archos 605 is a little on the large and heavy side, but it is easily forgiven because the screen is 4.3 inches of LCD touch screen brilliance. All buttons are located along the right-hand side and it even comes with its own kickstand and external speaker for multi-person viewing.
Unfortunately, the battery life in audio mode is less than half that of the iPod Classic, and although the Archo’s battery isn’t bad compared to many of the other MP3 players we reviewed, next to the iPod it just seems sad. Additionally, it takes almost 10 hours to fully charge the battery using the supplied USB cord. If you want a faster charge you have to invest in the DVR docking station.Help/Support:
We didn’t find anything particularly special about Archos’ help and support. They include documentation for all their players, a FAQ section and firmware updates. However, we were saddened to find their email system didn’t work and the only way to contact the company was through telephone.
When we called the company with some format compatibly questions we were disappointed to find the operator on the other line, while nice, wasn’t terribly knowledgeable and we had to wait about 10 minutes on hold for him to find the answers to our questions. Fortunately, most of our other questions were answered prior to that using the FAQs and online documentation.Summary:
The Archos 605 with Wi-Fi is one of the best time wasters money can buy. This is the next generation of portable media and entertainment. But keep in mind, the price tag on the package isn’t the last time you’ll shell out cash to use this player.
©2008 TopTenREVIEWS, Inc.
