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Archos Widescreen PMP
An anonymous reader writes "Archos has just announced their newest portable audio/video player the AV 700 Mobile DVR. The new unit has a 480x234 pixel widecreen display, a hub to record from TV and DVD, and offers a 100GB drive. The sucker is heavy though weighing in at over a pound. Cost is $799 for the 100GB model and $599 for the 40GB. MP3 Newswire also has Part 1 of its MP3 players for summer. Most interesting are Creative's new Neeon and a high end unit from Bose."
If people want to listen to music, the will want something smaller, if they want to watch video, they will want something bigger. I personally don't think that combining a portable audio/video player is a good idea or will sell well.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
I don't want to spend $800 on a portable display device that doesn't render at least 480p DVD quality. The specs listed are ambiguous. It says that there's a doc station for pass through to a VCR. Does this mean that its only external output is composite? If so - yuck. I expect at least component, and preferably also DVI/HDMI. And why would I want to carry 100GB of disk space on a portable if it won't output true 480p? Never mind that disk space like that is appropriate for HD as well.
So, my opinion: nice toy; waste of money. --M
For those of us not from the US that con't be bothered to type 20.8oz in kg in Google.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
... you think a pound is heavy.
The question when thing start costing this much is if your better off with a laptop , the machine is smaller , lighter and has a larger hard-drive than most laptops in that that price range . . .
Though it lacks a keyboard , the screen is smaller and it cant directly play DVDs
I can see the thing being highly hackable if it runs linux but i doubt it would ever have as many features as a laptop
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I guess the only good things about devices like this is that they're smaller and come pre-configured for their task.
Thoughts on the 2nd linked article on MP3 players: 1. The Bose is CD based. Bose really doesn't get it. The extra time, effort, and waste of making a CD every time to change the music selection is too much of a hassle vs. flash and hdd players. 2. The Maxfield Diablo plays OGG, neat.
From the weight of it, I'd be more worried about the unit breaking your pocket.
Bose is all about the quality of sound (as opposed to Bang and Olufsen who are all about style and exclusivity).
As soon as I read that, I knew these people know nothing but marketing hype.
I've owned the JBMM20 and the AV300 - the great-grandfather and grandfather of the AV700 - and I have to say that they're amazing pieces of technology. They run embedded firmware on the DSC25 that is compatible with linux so you can run Linux on it if you really want. The video playback on the AV300 is stunning, even at 352x240 resolution: you can read subtitles clear as day. It has decent quality sound (much better if you get a nicer pair of headphones like the Seinnheiser HD280 Pro), a bright lcd screen and 3-4 hours of video playback on the "Low Brightness" option which ironically is quite bright still. Oh yeah... and it plays DiVX
For anyone that's interested, don't even think about getting the bigger harddrive model. Both old and new models use standard 3.5" laptop harddrives, which means you can buy one off of PriceWatch and slap it in there. Just format it with a FAT boot sector first and you're good to go.
How come 75% of the posts in here say that it's better to buy a laptop.
The Archos Pma430 is 600$, just search it on froogle.
Archos has a deal with Echostar in US to market all their Gmini400, AV400 and AV700 in special packages, maybe rebranded as PocketDish. This is interesting because Echostar will probably give away this portable video player/recorder just for getting new customers over from the DirecTV/Tivo users.
The Archos players are approximately same price as an iPod anyways, so stop saying that it's better to have a laptop, then you should say that the iPod is the same price as a laptop, and then anyways all Archos devices are much cooler than iPods.
Specially the Pma430 which is a fully hackable Linux embarqued with touch-screen, wifi, usb-host and still has all the portable video recorder/player full DivX compatibillity (dvd-resolution simple profile + b-frames + vbr-mp3)
Excuse me? This unit gives a screen aspect ratio of 2.05:1. This is about 15% wider than widescreen TVs, which have an aspect ratio of 16:9 or roughly 1.78:1. So, it is not "somehow" widescreen -- it is widescreen. Whoever modded you as "insightful" needs to be modded "-1 clueless".
:)
Oh, great. Now this unit will give the anti-widescreen crowd a reason to bitch about why 16:9 movies have the black bars in the sides. Wonderful.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
"One significant problem that we found in our reviews of their players is that most movie files available online are in formats not readable by the Archos, requiring them to be laboriously converted before they could play on their devices."
If Archos would like to expand its marketshare (and survive the onslaught by Sony and, eventually Apple), they need to address this fundamental flaw with their PMP line of players.