 "Archos 7" | 2009-11-18 |
| - Reviewed By svarela |
This review is for Archos users: This is Archos' best product to date. The OS freezes every once in a while, but this is nothing new. The selling points--320GBs!! Plays 720p material, and when tranferring DVD data it will display subtitles on your screen. It also comes with the web browser and and web radio/TV plgins $30-$40 saved from the get-go. Sooner or later Archos will bundle all these plugins and include it with the price. What they NEED to do is make a free plugin available for flash everytime it gets updated. Sigh. It also gives you the ability to access and send e-mail directly from the e-mail application using POP and SMTP protocols. WARNING: This will not work with Yahoo! accounts. Yahoo! charges for this service while others sites give it to their users for free. It also will display .DOC files instead of just the .TXT files. You will also be able to keep contact information, along with pics, on the device. It acts more and more like a mobile PC.
The drawbacks are it is still using the opera browser, which freezes every so often and will not play updated flash content found on sites such as [...]. Hopefully this is resolved with the addition of Windows 7 in the Archos 9pctablet. The OS freezes every once in a while, but this is nothing new. It tends to happen more when I use the e-mail app. You STILL have to pay for the Cinema, Podcast and HD plugins. That is just frustrating, you are buying the player to play these formats. Archos, bundle it in the player already! |
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| "Best 7' player on the market" | 2009-11-16 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2F93SR7ULJENC |
| I have used my Archos 7 320Gb for a month now. While it is not perfect (interface could be improved, price for add-ons, lack of accessories, poor speaker quality), I am enjoying every moment of it. It is a life saver for car or train trips with our sons (no need to carry DVD's.) Perfect size also for an airplane ride. Easy to use with the touchscreen and wonderful image quality. Yes it could be improved to make it great but...it is still the best video player on the market with that screen size and storage space. |
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 "JUST......GREAT...." | 2009-11-14 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1EWJW0P5TS4X |
| TOOK THE ARCHOS TO A FAMILY PARTY, HOOKED IT UP TO THE AMPLIFIER AND WE HAD LOTS OF MUSIC AND A GREAT TIME |
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| "Happy with what I have!!!!" | 2009-10-31 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3BYF12ODXQ9ML |
| I always wanted this device and as a person that travels a lot Archos 7 is golden. I bought couple of codecs and games added videos and music to my device. Right now I'm good to go anywhere plus I get to surf online. |
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 "Freezes just enough that I am sending it back for refund" | 2009-10-26 |
| - Reviewed By User: A10RX53MBYXZIA |
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. |
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 "Good Potential, Poor Product." | 2009-10-24 |
| - Reviewed By User: ANC02V4AVB5L2 |
I, too, wanted to really like this product, but from the start it has been one uphill battle after another.
I lost one of the speakers after only one use, the battery overheats to the point of causing 3rd degree burns, and the operating software is not intuitive. It took a lot of hit and miss before I figured half of it out. I thought it would be easy to download movies to it, NO it wasn't. And the movie selection at Archos website was a joke. It holds a lot of music, but not easy to load music either, especially if you try to follow archos' poorly worded instructions from the website. OVERALL, DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND SKIP THIS AND ALL OTHER ARCHOS PRODUCTS. I'm still waiting for Archos tech support to fix my product under warranty, but they have yet to respond to emails and calling them and talking to a live person is an impossibility. |
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Expedited Available
