It's not the most flexible of satnavs either. It disagreed with our TomTom about whether it was quicker to go through London or around the M25 on a Friday night. An hour later, it was still insisting we turn around and drive back up to M25 - adding at least two hours to the journey. It was only when we came out the other side that it conceded and re-calculated the route. It was also slow to obtain its initial fix - ten minutes into the journey it still hadn't got any idea where we were. On the plus side, it lasted a full three hour's route finding with battery to spare at the end.
Despite a built-in GPS, the bundled satnav app is just trialware
Archos quotes the 5's battery life at up to 22 hours for audio and seven hours for video, and our test results weren't far off. Playing music on a constant loop came in just under 22 hours and video playback lasted five hours 43 minutes before the battery gave up. We were testing an SSD unit, though, and we'd expect the more power-hungry HDD models to use up their juice a little more quickly.
When it comes to getting files onto the device you can either let Windows Media Player manage the process for you, or directly drag and drop files into the right folders using Windows Explorer.
Fulfilling the Internet Tablet part of its name, there's 802.11n built in and a full web browser so you can jump online whenever you're in range of a wireless hotspot. There's no Flash support currently, which means you can't catch up on iPlayer but YouTube videos will open in the video player app so you can at least watch those.
Verdict
We were very impressed with the Archos 5 first time round and the addition of Android combined with the hardware tweaks only improves things. While it is lacking some aspects of the full Android experience, the 5 still has far more potential than most PMPs that don't even have the option for third-party apps, let alone an already active development community churning out applications. Yes, the iPod Touch does too, but the 5 has a much bigger screen. ®
More PMPs Reviews...
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Archos 5 Internet Tablet Android-based PMP
COMMENTS
Beware Nicolas Charbonnier aka Charbax
Nicolas Charbonnier is better known as Charbax, the #1 Archos fanboy who will go on every Archos review and try to tell the world that they will be fixing all of the problems some time soon. His forum is just him cheer leading for Archos. So take his comments with a grain of salt. He's rather like the Microsoft dude in the Apple commercials, promising that the new version of Windows will not have the problems of the last version.
Nicolas Charbonnier=charbax owner of archosfans
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/unhappy_32.png
Don't listen to charbax. He's such a archos fanboi.
He has a site dedicated to being a archos fanboi.
He gets a boner from hearing the word archos.
This guy is a tard and a tool.
He literary responds to each and every archos type review to defend why archos makes such
crap products.
This Tool went so far as to buy stock in the failing company.
So take charbax comments on archos be reliable with a grain of salt.
He said all the previous models which now has no support were great also.
Charbax =http://www.reghardware.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/fail_32.png
all negative comments from the same troll
I'm using the Archos 5 Internet Tablet with Android using the iGo stowaway bluetooth foldable keyboard to write this comment, it works absolutely awesomely and replaces my laptop when output on my 42" HDTV using the HDMI output.
Media playback and Internet Browsing is close to perfect even now with just Android 1.5 firmware, which was only supposed to work for A couple HTC phones. With the updates with Android 1.6 and 2.0, Archos will get all the wvga apps, Google Marketplace and all that so it will rteach closer to perfection.
Screw Archos
I have an AV500, really nice unit, never seen any other device (even PC software) that can ffwd/rew through video files as well+quick as this unit can, external recording is nice - but the kicker is the HD in my unit now has a few errors on it and Archos have implimented software locking so I can't replace the drive myself. Physically it's possible to swapt the drive out, which I tried but it just refuses to use the new drive. I tried contacting them through support email wanting to pay them to do the replacement - no answer.
Utter utter bastards.
Never gonna buy Archos stuff again, especially as it seems you have to buy codecs to play back standard video formats and if you want to record from cameras etc. you need to buy a plethora of docks for the damn things.
