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Review of the Archos AV320 Cinemabox
An anonymous reader writes "MP3newswire.net just posted another of their lengthy reviews, this time on the Archos AV 320, a unit first mentioned on /. back in June. The company's second portable digital video/audio player, the new unit is a significant step up from the Archos Jukebox Multimedia with a much bigger and brighter screen and the ability to record DVDs and TV programs."
A fleet of rabid attack lawyers has been dispatched to the area regarding an alleged copyright infrigement. No comment on whether prosecutors will seek the death penalty.
Dephine URL
Although it says it is available on Amazon, and Amazon lists the player, it is not available for sale.
Plus, its $600 a lot to pay for a gadget that is mostly "gee-whiz".
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The article says it's available on Amazon, but they have it listed as unavailable. Anyone know where you can buy it? 'Can't believe ThinkGeek doesn't carry it yet, would seem a more obvious reason for /. to post a review...
Looks nice, I was concerned about the battery life, but 3.5 hours for video is better than my laptop manages playing DivX.
For those who want my exact specs:
What's in the Box: AV320 Video Recorder, USB 2.0 cable, AC adapter, Li-Ion batteries (already installed), stereo headphones, AV cinch cable (SCART adapter in Europe). CD with MusicMatch, drivers and 6-language manual. Digital Video Recorder, audio & video cables, remote control and 6 langage installation sheet.
Capacity: 20 GB Hard Disk
Interface: USB 2.0, extra fast, compatible USB 1.1, PC & Mac . Optional FireWire cable.
Video playback: MPEG-4 SP with MP3 stereo sound, near-DVD quality. Resolutions 352x288@30f/s, or 640x272@25f/s, up to 640x368@20f/s. AVI file format, reads XviD and DivX"* 4.0 & 5.0.
Music playback: Stereo MP3 decoding @ 30-320 kb/s CBR & VBR, WMA @ 160 kb/s
Music recording: Stereo MP3 encoding @ 30-160 kb/s VBR
Photo viewer: JPEG (except progressives) or BMP of any size
Display: 3,8'' color LCD (QVGA) 320xRGBx240 pixels or TV
AV Connections: Stereo analog Line In & digital SPDIF Line In/Out. Composite Video/ Earphone/ Line Out jack. Built-in microphone.
Playback Autonomy : Up to 10 hours on MP3 or 3 1/2 hours for video on built-in LCD
Scalability: Downloadable firmware updates from www.archos.com.
Power Source: Internal: Rechargeable Li-Ion Batteries. External: AC charger / adapter.
Dimensions & Weight: 112 x 82 x 31 mm (4.4" x 3.2" x 1.2"). 350g (12.5 oz)
Connection: Plugs into AV320 expansion port.
Capture rate: PAL : 320x240 @ 25 f/s, NTSC / 304 X 224 @30 f/s
Video Input: Analog Composite Video or S-video
Audio input: Analog stereo audio Mini-jack - RCA
Video compression: mpeg-4 SP with MP3 stereo sound in AVI format (can be read by XviD or DivX players)
Audio compression: Stereo MP3 96-192 kb/s CBR (Constant Bit Rate)
Dimensions & weight: 60 x 54 x 30mm (2.3''x2.1''x1.2''), 45g (1.5 oz)
Systems Requirements: PC: Pentium ii 266 MHz. Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, 64 MB RAM; MAC: 9.2 or 10.2.4 iMac, G3 or higher
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
Get a GP32.. 256MB card. Divx your dvds, download via boardband your tv shows.. and enjoy. Plus is plays doom etc
I have to bring up the same old issue: cost. As long as I can get a cheap laptop with a bigger screen, and battery life that would at least last for my commute, why bother? Sure, the form-factor is awesome, and for $300, it'd be a no-brainer. But at $600, I'd drop coin on something I could also play games on and read email.
Why must companies continue to make multi-purpose products like this? When they do, it seems like they always use sub-standard components, and the whole thing ends up being low level versions of all of the different pieces that the product is comprised of. When someone needs a digital camera, they should buy a digital camera. They're cheap now, go get a good one. When someone needs a video camera, go get a video camera. They're small now, and a lot cheaper. Need a portable video monitor? If slightly over 3" is good enough for you, then be my guest and fork over the dough for this device.
I can hardly see any practicality in this device, and I'm VERY interested to find how many people that buy it that wouldn't have been better off with just a laptop for $200 more (yes, I understand a laptop is less portable).
Yeah, the geek in me would love to get this sweet little thing, but the business person in me knows better.
Celebrate Steak and a Blowjob Day!
I have never understood why people buy these things. Granted... its a cool gimmicky toy... but for 600USD!!! wow. Really, how much do you want to watch video on a 3" screen? Its kinda like those 15" plasma displays... that sell for a grand. Hey... plasma looks ultra cool, but... any movie looks bad on a 15" display... sheeesh... pay the same and get a nice 36" tv... it aint as sharp, but you can actually read text on the screen!
So beyond catering to "the geek that has everything"... I just cant picture why people want this stuff... having portable video, thats too damned small to see... is about as useful as having no video at all. Same guess for those stupid TV displays in cars... not to mention WTF are people putting tv's in cars anyways!!! Sheeeesh.... cell phones are bad enough.
Ok sorry... end of rant. In the end, this product just seems like a massively overpriced, relatively useless gimmick to me.
A portable porn machine!
---rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
it plays .ogg files, runs linux, irons my shirts, arm wrestles my little brother, makes a tasty denver omelette, beats me at Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 using Tron Bonne, Dan, and Ruby Heart, has a built in rubber stamp for voiding paper work, and walks 12 miles uphill both ways to school barefoot in the snow and likes it.
I have a nice little paperweight on my desk... it's supposedly an Archos MP3 player, but it sure doesn't act like one.
This thing broke shortly after I bought it, and despite repeated attempts to get through to their tech support (e-mail, phone), they just won't answer.
I'll never buy another Archos product again.
Boy, seems like a journalists dream! Slip it in your pocket and have a spy camera on you, do undercover reporting soo much easier! Also record memos for yourself or audio interviews. And, be able to review your recording on the spot.
This is a miniature digital camcorder/camera with an oversized screen
(compared to relatively larger size digital camcorders with a smaller screen)
It is already possible to record from a TV, VCR or DVD on a MiniDV camcorder that uses MiniDV tapes, and I think the miniDV market is going towards digital recording on non-tape media, so if I had to choose between that gadget and a decent future digital camcorder, I'd wait and choose the latter.
"rumors are that a video iPod is in the works" In my experiences, it has not been in Apple's philosophy recently to make a "superproduct" that does "everything". Apple is a very specialized company in itself, so I do not see why they would make a multifunction iPod. All the "features" that would be included would most likely complicate their famously intuitive iPod interface that everyone is noi doubt expecting.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
"The Jukebox Multimedia camera module offered middling results with its 1.3 pixel resolution"
1.3 pixels, eh? Yes, I'd say your results would be middling, at best.
Archos is already selling AV380's with a 80Gb disk for a price of around 1000 Euro's.
This will give you just enough to load all of the Star Trek episodes from all series (STTOS,STTNG, STDS9,STVOY & STENT).
Archos seem to be offering good value for money, and lots of add-on options.
What I'd like to see:
1. Linux
2. Camera plugin
3. Foldable Wifi keyboard
4. General slot for GPS cards, etc.
5. More disk space
Then we have something that looks pretty much like my ideal portable device, and for which $600 is not a lot.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
gotta love how they mention that the quality of a baseball game recorded from broadcast tv through the outputs of a vcr aren't as good as a sample movie [ice age] included with the device, which was probably ripped from dvd on a computer then uploaded to the thing...i wonder why that could be...
The iPod is not in the same class not because it is inferior, but because it doesn't try to be everything like the Acrhos. The Acrhos tries to do both MP3 playing and video playing, and suffers as a result. Who wants to spend that much money for a bulky device with poor battery life that's windows only? The iPod keeps it simple, doing music and other PDA like things. Plus, lets not forget that the interface on the iPod takes a backseat to no one. Is pocket video really the killer app? I doubt it. The whole point of an MP3 player is that you can listen while you do other things. Video obviously is not the same way, and has less of a need to be so portable. These devices will never see anywhere near as much success as the iPod.
For those of you who didn't read the review I found this portion to be very interesting.
Is this a product review or an opinion piece???
It is fair use to record a show off of television for later viewing; it doesn't matter if you use a VCR or a digital video recorder. It is fair use to lend that tape or file to your friend next door so they can watch it. Is it fair use to trade with 4 million "friends" simultaneously on the Internet? In Canada it is, but the US is another story. That's what the RIAA is suing individual music file traders over (the MPAA -- the RIAA's motion picture lobby equivalent -- is waiting before taking the same route, they too might consider the same tactics against file trading.)
Since the Archos allows users to make good quality recordings of TV programs and DVDs, you will start to see more such programming reach the Net as the mediabox niche grows. The Archos player records via analog methods (a cable to a DVD or VCR), so it is unaffected by any Digital Rights management protections added to DVDs. If you can view it on your television, the Archos can record it. This doesn't make the media companies happy.
In our opinion, file trading is not the threat the entertainment conglomerates make it out to be. Yes music sales are down and that allows the record companies to blame it all on file trading, but DVD sales are up. Way up. Every major movie release has made it on the Net, usually well before the DVD comes out. Did DVD sales go down? No. Did they stay the same? No. Did they go up? Yes, by 61 percent.
But our protests and logic mean little if Disney takes you to court. You lose the moment you have to shell out for that first session with the lawyer, so our advice is to be cautious with the files you create and remember, Micky Mouse is not a nice guy in real life.
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
I went to Amazon and they list it as discontinued.. Where can I get this?
Bet this
This device only supports the mpeg-4 SP profile, once it supports the ASP profile and h.264 and will auto-scale whatever geometry it's given, it would be the must-have device it wants to be. However, a low-power ASIC that supports the latest mpeg-4 goodies will need to be made mass-available first. :-)
on my current camcorder (sony drctrv22), with the biggest battery available, I can play over 9 hours of tapes on the lcd.
and i imagine things can only get better from that point on...
1. Copy Apple, without intuitive features 2. Create ads in which actors smash objects used in Apple ads 3. ??? 4. Profit!! Does this model support IDv3 tags? If not, chuck it in that wastebin. My friend has an Archos Multimedia 20, and it's bulky, a little slow, its menus are difficult to navigate through, and there's no IDv3 support allowing easy ways to find your music. It also makes duplicates of MP3s when you create playlists.
It's interesting to see how this is all playing out. No doubt in the future digital bandwidth will be high enough that there's no quality tradeoff, but in the present I find it fascinating that, on the one hand you have audiophiles insisting that CD's are an impossibly compromised format while, on the other hand, the public seems to be perfectly happy with the distinctly lower quality of .mp3 (and .aac).
Now we have DVD's which are far inferior to, say, traditional 70mm projection to begin with... people watching DVD's on small portable players... and, soon, people watching highly compressed digital video on even tinier players.
Will cheap, plentiful, convenient low-quality digital media undercut the market for HDTV, huge plasma displays, etc?
I think the very last thing I would ever have expected would be for digital media to result in a general lowering of quality--not the subtle lowering audiophiles claim to be so disturbed by, but gross, obvious lowering.
Perhaps in a few years I will be sitting down to enjoy Lawrence of Arabia in 640x480 pixels at 15 fps...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
I don't own one of those new ones but I have (had?) an Archos Multimedia Jukebox 20. And as far as the technical specs g(and this review) go it looks pretty much like an updated Archos MMJB 20. First of all, it's an incredible machine. Ideal for recording sessions if you have a band or doing interviews and stuff like that. And besides the great sound features, wich are near to perfection, I liked the possibility to view Buffy on the subway or taking that downloaded movie over to my friends place and watch it on his huge TV-screen. And here's the big and sounding
BUT:
- My Archos display broke after 14 days and was sent back to the manufactorer. I haven't heard anything about it since (8weeks!!)
- I wasn't able to convert any of my movies with mencoder into a format the archos could read. I am pretty sure I did everything right and read all of the Howtos and doublechecked every setting twice. And still, I couldn't get it to work. The VirtualDub Software worked on Win2k but I wish I could just write a script for mencoder and let it encode EVERYTHING in my moviefolder for the archos. No luck so far. Any hints welcome...
just my 2cents,
Lispy
This is like a company coming out with a new toaster.
And then you say you'd like to see:
1) Linux (because everything, including toasters, can be made better with linux)
2) ability to heat up food, not just make bread crispy
3) digital keypad
4) integrated timer
5) faster speed
So, in essence, what you actually want is called a "microwave oven." If the toaster doesn't do what you need it to, then maybe a toaster isn't what you should look at?
Things I find relevant not mentioned in the review:
.avi files I've attempted to convert and it is invariably too much work to figure out why.
1) The display does indeed power down when you're listening to mp3's, but you have to power it back up to skip songs or even adjust volume. It's especially irritating in that you need to hit the relevant control once to wake it up, the second time to do what you're trying to do.
2) The ability to record from DVD is somewhat suspect- I've been putting Baby Einstein videos on there to have a portable version, and there's a certain DVD in my collection that has turned into garbage halfway through the recording process like 10 times. Not longer than the other ones that work, not identifiably any different at all, but still, it isn't recording. DRM issues or what, I couldn't tell you.
3) Ships without any kind of screen protector. Try getting this in the mail and _not_ carrying it around in your pocket or playing with it until you've had a chance to discover that no standard PDA screen thingy fits and you have to cut your own. Mine has small scratches on the screen from merely a couple of days of use.
4) The video file format conversion process is kind of haphazzard. Their program to convert has rejected numerous
I love this thing, but it's not without a few problems that went unmentioned in the review. As to those that can't believe someone would spend money on this, I say: it's fun and useful right now and it does enough that you'd be buying its future replacement for weight/dimension changes only. I'll enjoy mine while you wait for the weightless free version with infinite battery life and forward compatibility with dimensional warp generators.
Yes, up to a point. I have a SonicBlue web pad, and it's very, very nice, but too little disk space, no extensibility, poor battery life.
A laptop is too large to carry in your pocket. The Archos is just right. A laptop can't work as a digital camera or videocorder, the Archos can, easily. A laptop is a nasty music player (how do you skip tracks without opening the thing?). A laptop can't be used for playing games on the subway. A laptop can't work from one hand.
Why Linux? Because then I can install the software of my choice, which makes the price tag much more acceptable.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I have had the mp3 player for over a year now and simply love it! I use it to store all of my CDs for taking to and from work. I always have my CD collection with me. I can also use it to transfer data that I download to my home or work machine and as a second harddrive for my work laptop.
My friend has one that she uses to record lectures with. She can record weeks worth of lectures without ever having to worry about flipping a tape:)
The Archos that I have is a wonderful product, the only thing keeping me from upgrading is that it is still in perfect condidition and the price of the latest and greatest model is a bit out of my price range.
But, I can see one day (in the future) walking around with one of these with not only my entire CD collection, but my entire DVD collection.
Anyone got any ideas?
What makes you say it only works with Windows?
The device can be attached as a simple USB mass
storage device.
Even if it does not ship with extra software for
non-Windows systems, it's perfectly useable with
Linux and MacOS X.
" Usually when something breaks, it's Back To Dealer."
/.)
Usually. But since Archos only sells via mail-order in the US (even its dealers **both of them**) you have to mail it to *somewhere*. There is no store.
And the two dealers they have don't take returns. They say "return it to manufacturer".
So if you can't reach the manufacturer, you're basically screwed.
(Sony has a similar situation, except they have enough service depots to make it workable. Archos should kiss people's ass for buying a no-name-brand. Instead, they have arrogant guys in support who basically say "not my problem" on
"Once in, we immediately saw the signal come up on the AV320's screen, a baseball game between L.A. and St. Louis. We hit record and the player did just that. Even though connecting the player to the source was a fuss, recording was effortless."
They didn't even have implied oral consent.
-R
I laugh every time some tin-ear on /. tells me "yea, 128kb .aac's are CD quality".
Its a joke.
I guess "hi-fi" doesn't even exist as concept any more.
I don't care for having to boot up a laptop/PC every time I want to watch a DivX.
Does anyone know of such a beast? Even more so, can you get it in the UK?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Does anyone else pronounce this like Homer? i.e., "sax-a-ma-phone"?
I've been drooling over this thing for awhile at the Best Buy site. You might also be able to get it directly from Archos.
I was hoping that this might show up on the dell site. Even though they are freaking slow, they might have a sweet deal. Unfortunately, they only have the older Multimedia Jukebox.
What kind of idiot reviews *ANY* electronic device and fails to post any quantitative numbers?
And did this idiot even hear of divx prior to reveiwing the first one?
And what the fuck is Simple Profile and Advanced Simple Profile. Isn't Advanced Simple Profile a fucking oxymoron? What the fuck?
How about S/N Ratio, seperation and freq. response on the audio portion, maximum resolution, bitrate, codecs (and features of those codecs, such as quaterpel, GMC, etc, etc) supported, and very importantly, frame by frame comparison, of the unit's input and output.
This jerkoff wrote a shitty review for an electronic device. The only specs we learned is the megapixel count and optical zoom of the camera, and the screen size. Pretty fucking useless. The catalog description probably has more information than that piece of crap.
"Me and my wife are old geezers, and are easily impressed by anything that can plug into 50 year old obsolete technology. We were really amazed by a 1" screen that only plays heavily processed video. Now we are even more amazed by this gizmo. It plays movies don't you know?"
I bought a Dell Axim X5 400MHz last year. The PocketPC OS notwithstanding, it is a great little unit. I can store 2.33 hours of DivX MPEG-4 encoded video on my 256MB flash card, and that's at 30fps 320x240 with 16-bit 22kHz mono audio. In addition, I have all sorts of emulators for old game systems and my old HP48GX, plus (surprise) it's my information organizer and remote Internet access device. Its battery life for movie playback is about 4 hours on a full charge on the standard battery, and 10 hours of MP3 playback. That's more than enough for a full day of use, and I can still do other things with it.
The downside of the Axim, of course, is that it doesn't have anywhere near the capacity of the Archos. Even that can be partly addressed by attaching a PC card hard drive to the PDA using a CF-to-PC-card adapter though it saps battery life. The multifunction nature of the Dell, however, is something I can't compromise on for now (Small-and-Flaccid(TM) OS notwithstanding).
Mod the product with location track/recording and you're a good ways towards having a functional LifeLog for DARPA. 'course you'd need a bunch of external battery power and probably a better camera setup than the Archos plug-on. Maybe a little pencil camera + microphone stuck inside your beanie to record concert footage or basic candid camera.
For more on Lifelog, check out the Wired article
Is 70mm film what we see movies at the theater in?? Give me DVD quality ANY DAY over that crap. Theater quality is crap, I understand it's film and higher resolution, but you're blowing it up to a 50'+ screen, of course it's gonna look bad. Give me smaller screen with higher quality. Aside from the resolution, what's with the jitters and jumps? Have you ever noticed that everything on the screen is jumping all over the place 3"-1'? It's no wonder they make the credits more edgy these days, or people would notice the crap quality at the theater.
Now, for "new" formats...poorly encoded DivX can look considerably worse than an original DVD, but if you get a good dual pass encoder (like DVDRip on Linux, which uses Transcode) then it's amazing the quality you can get. I rip all my DVD's to DivX to watch on my PS2 using BroadQ. On my 62" HDTV you'd be hard pressed to tell the DVD from the Divx.
It's the same with HDTV, am I the only one who thinks HDTV is 90% hype 10% better picture? My parents have a 60" Mitsubishi HDTV with a reciever built in. (I have a 62" Toshiba without an HDTV reciever.) The HDTV does look better, but it's not 50% better. Maybe 10%, and I don't find it enhances my viewing experience at all.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
WILDCAT IS ON TEH SPOKE - an explanation. Read and you will know the origins of the saying.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The "mistake" Archos is making is in chosing what functions I want and giving us an expensive package which cannot be further tailored. I might have use for such a device IF it could effectively replace some other high priced piece of electronics. How about offering a GPS add-on? I don't want to buy a $2K GSP and screen in all the family cars. But one unit based upon this Archos would actually save me money and be transferable and usable as an entertainment device when not actually moving.
What I don't like is the terrible battery life I get from it. The best it can manage is about 4 hours of play if I've just unplugged it, and if it sits unplugged over night, I sometimes only get about an hour. I'm not the only one having these battery issues either. I've seen many other owners complaining about the same thing.
It's not a big deal when I'm using it at my desk, but the thing is practically useless for long trips away from a power source, which was one of the reasons I wanted it. I don't know if the MediaBox has the same issues, but if you're interested in it, I'd recommend waiting for some customer feedback on it before you buy one.
Why not just read a book?
$600US can buy a lot of books at a used book store. Most of those books will be a lot more compelling than watching some crappy hollywood movie again and again on the bus.
It's not the life changing device most sub-25-year-olds would think it is.
I don't think Archos realizes that the type of people who would buy something like this are photographers. Otherwise they would consider supporting RAW camera output format. Professionals prefer raw format because it gives them the greatest latitude to change the exposure later on their computer.
Sure the other group that would use this are digital videographers. In fact this product may be more tuned to them.
The usage of flash for storage of pictures and video is very expensive and therefore makes owning one of these devices very cost effective (consider $1.5K for a 4G flash card). Offloading your pictures on the go lets you reuse the flash card again and again.
Still there is a point at which the cost of such a device is more than that of a laptop, and this is getting very close.
I myself chose the Flashtrax to offload my digital photos. It is not perfect either. I would characterize it as a device created by some bright individuals that did not have the development money to finish the software. It gets better with each flash update, but it is still not that great. But it does handle RAW format (progressive JPEG was just added and is slow as a dog). Overall I am happy with it. It will let me offload pictures during my comming vacation.
Nixvue is another company making a device like this. They also handle RAW formats. I almost bought one of their units instead of the Flashtrax.
Before I bought the Flashtrax I was hoping some company would create a compact flash card reader for the iPod, so that one could upload photos (albite blindly) to its disk.
Have you tried carrying 3-4 items in your pockets at the same time?
If you're travelling on the subway, you'd have to just be checking your pockets to make sure they're still there.
Its about innovation. Cars have been evolving for over a 100 years now.
All-in-one devices like this one needs time to evolve too.
3 years down the line when all-in-one devices become mature, you will go for one yourself.
NTT DoCoMo is offering a 2megapixel camera in its 3G phones now.
Given a choice of a mobile phone and a digital camera and a NTT phone with a lesser price, which one would you prefer? I'm sure you'd go for the NTT phone.
People like you are falling into the minority now because the sales of mobile phones with built in camera and covergence devices is taking off.
Would a business person(tech savvy) prefer a handheld player or a laptop to see his DVD movies?
Somebody who buys the Archos buys it for its features.
Using the same argument, instead of a Archos, they should go in for a laptop, so instead of a laptop they should go in for a desktop. It will be 300 $ cheaper. Yes, its less portable but that's the argument you use yourself.
Do you think opening up a laptop on the subway and watching a movie is more convenient than just having the Archos in your hand?
Don't think so.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
Actually, the trend in digital video quality is generally upwards. There have been a few sudden drops in quality whenever a new platform for media appeared. Witness the progression from full color glossy photography to ASCII pr0n, to what we have now.
I keep on saying again and again that what the world needs is a new niche market which is a cross between a budget laptop and a high-powered PDA.
This would be very similar to the clamshell Zaurus, but about twice the speed, or have some kind of hardware video decoding acceleration so that it can play back CPU-hungry codecs like XVid/DivX without transcoding with ease.
Everything I've read about today's PDAs indicates that they BARELY, and I mean BARELY play video files at 30fps.
The Archos device costs more than most PDAs and hasn't the same kind of bang for the buck.
The Sony PSP that is in development promises to deliver great video playback, but only through proprietary mini DVD-like discs. And since this would be a game console, it would be difficult to convert it into a full fledged PDA/computer.
But I think the first company that really "does it right" will really make bank.
Right now computer manufacturers are having a field day with laptops because they have much higher profit margins than desktops. The problem is, the average joe has no intention of dropping even a grand on a laptop he knows is going to be obsolete and impossible to upgrade a year or two down the road.
I think the sweet spot is at the $500-600 pricepoint and laptops just haven't broken that barrier yet. The cheapest laptops are at least 200 dollars more and are so bare-bones you have to spend a few hundred more just to make them useable.
And used laptops? Used laptops that truly have the throughput it takes to play DivX movies effectively haven't really come down below $700 either.
I don't know about you, but I would want a Laptop running Win2K or XP to be fast enough to be able to do some multitasking in addition to stutter-free DivX as well. You need a LITTLE headroom there.
The biggest problem is the hardware itself...
Xscale isn't a Pentium. It has no floating point unit, and topping off at 400mhz it's cycle-per-cycle slower than what an x86 would need to clock at to play DivX effectively.
To make matters worse, there is still no strong push for hardware accelerated video on PDAs. Most have dumb framebuffers. PDAs singled out that contain ATI Imageons still don't seem to be able to play video files that great either.
So the industry needs to catch up. PDAs aren't just for appointment calendars anymore, and unlike Bill Gates' ideas, few people are going to pay thousands for tablet PCs.
There needs to be a new widget that has all the flexibility of a PDA/laptop and a media player but not necessarily top-of-the-line performance.