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Archos 32 Android media player
Pint-sized PMP with potential
Touchscreen treat
The 32 has a resistive screen but by a country mile it’s the best I have ever encountered. It’s faster, more reactive and more accurate than the panel in the 43, which itself wasn’t bad. The absence of multi-touch zoom aside when playing Angry Birds, it’s almost impossible to tell it’s not capacitive.
The power and volume keys are too close together
The speed of the interface is in some part due to the manly CPU under the bonnet. Archos says it’s an 800MHz chip but interrogate the system with Quadrant Standard and you’ll see it’s actually clocked at 1GHz. The Quadrant benchmark test threw up a score of 1517 which is on a par with an HTC Desire HD even though the 32 only has 256MB of Ram.
Archos seldom skips on codec support, and the 32 is no different. MP3, Flac, Ogg Vorbis, WMA and AAC audio are all supported along, with WMV, AVI, H.264, MKV and QuickTime video up to 720p. The video player also supports most common subtitle file types and visually things look rather good despite the low resolution.
Sound quality proved to be uniformly of a high standard and there is plenty of volume on tap though to take full advantage of the 32’s sonic ability you will need to bin the supplied headphones and buy some better ones.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
