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Archos Generation 5 Launch
Thing is! I'm lazy. My computer sits on a desk in my bedroom, and there's a lot of cool content on it. Yet I often find myself lying in bed and whining about the 4 feet I have to travel to get there. Well, we all know that you can stream content from the Internet, but the Archos 605 personal media player can actually stream content from your desktop. At the launch event for their 5th generation product line in New York this past week, Archos talked about a lot of things, but that was what first made me sit up and think, hey, these guys are talking to people like me.
Archos is the company that introduced the Jukebox, the first portable hard-drive based MP3 player. You probably remember it as having these cartoonish rubber corners and the type of portability that made you want to go to your dictionary and look the word up to make sure it still meant what you thought it did. Since I think I'm not alone in having heard about this brick of a device and not bought anything until a certain shiny piece of white plastic came my way, they've happily learned their lessons and applied them to this new generation of products. They're articulating a pretty broad product line, which begins with the 101, available at 2 gigs and having more of an iPod form factor. Now I love my iPod, but I don't think it's the right size for video, so let's move on to the 405, which is also 2 gigs but has a bigger screen and a more rectangular form factor. Then there's the 605 and the 705, which take the form factor of the 405 and put it on increasingly larger doses of Human Growth Hormone. The 705 - with its 7-inch screen and 800 x 480 resolution display - is the largest model, slotting into what is technically referred to as the "ginormous" category of personal media players. Though it is a tablet-style device and not hinged, it is nonetheless about the size of a personal DVD player. Such devices might be great for some, but personally, they strike me as low-end laptops instead of high-end anything else. Therefore, the 705 left me impressed with the size but ultimately unmoved. The 605, however- with a 4.3 inch screen boasting the same 800 x 480 resolution - was the rockstar of the show. It comes in three models, based on size; a 4GB model with a flash drive, and 30 and 160 gig models with conventional spinny hard drives. Though the concept of a flash hard drive makes me hot, 4 gigs seems pretty pointless. On the other end, 160 gigs is mind-numbingly awesome, and 30 occupies a goldilocks-like midpoint that I see being their most popular model. The first thing you notice about the 605 is, this guy has a touch screen. Which makes you think! where have touch screens been all these years, anyway? Aside from an ATM, a Treo or that iPhone we're waiting for Jesus to send down on a cloud with herald angels, touch screens are a lot less common than their awesomeness would suggest. The 605 has a number of interesting features, including internet radio and a yet-to-be launched widgets feature, because everybody knows if your product doesn't include widgets, the terrorists win. Everything is accessed through a Linux-based operating system that is clear and pretty slick-looking, though I wouldn't have minded another round of usability testing. There's a slim line of soft keys that reproduce the full menu items in a way not entirely clear; and the buttons on the right of the device rock back and forth to provide 2 different actions, which isn't immediately clear from the icons on some of them. The 605 includes the standard ability to download content from your computer (via USB) onto the device. With 30 gigs, you've got a lot of options -- most people could get their entire music library and their top dozen or so favorite movies loaded up. Photos are also supported. But none of those features are why you'd buy one, because you can't swing a dead cat in a Best Buy and not hit a device that has those same features. You also can't swing a dead cat in a Best Buy without children weeping and security asking you to leave, as I've learned the hard way. The reason you would buy one, however, lives in one word: WiFi. This is the foundation of the previously mentioned stream-from-PC functionality, which allows you to access shared content from your desktop (PC or Mac, they tell me) and stream it onto the device. Movies, photos and music are all fair game. The functionality is accessed by clicking on the Network UPnP (universal plug and play) button on the screen. You then pick the right PC (you can share from multiple) and immediately see the files set up for sharing on that device. I'd love the opportunity to test it in real life, but for the time being, they claim that enabling sharing is simple and second-nature on your desktop.
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1 User Comment 1 - Posted by
MichaelHarper
on September 13, 2007 - 11:39 am Apparently, the Gen 5 products (most of them, at least) are now available for purchase. Yay! Check out the store... dub dub dub dot archos.com/store_us/. Now remember, kids... if Mommy and Daddy don't let you use their credit cards, they don't really love you.
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