Archos 7 Internet Multimedia Tablet

Many of you might of you have heard of Archos. These guys are like Cowon when it comes to multimedia players. The title should not be confused with any PMP or video player, as this is Archos’ much touted Internet tablet, and they have finally started officially selling in India. It plays many formats and does lots of cool stuff, sports some heavy features, and looks very appealing in its little grey case, so let’s just bring it out and see what this high end media player manufacturer has to offer, in its Archos 7 Internet Multimedia tablet.

Form
A heavy slab of technology lies in my palm, with a seven inch TFT LCD screen, sporting the regular 16.7 million colors. The resolution of the screen is 800x480 pixels. The outer chassis of the unit is a darker gun metal shade, with a shiny glossy finish, something that will be resplendent with fingerprints within 15 minutes of use. But no worries; Archos bundles a soft cleaning cloth, besides an adaptor for charging, USB (2.0) cable, manuals, and ordinary looking earphones.

There are narrow, rectangular, aluminum-colored, push buttons on the topside panel, with 2 LEDs next to it to signal operation and charging. Left side panel has DC in and 3.5 mm stereo headphone outlet, while the bottom panel has USB slots. It is quite a heavy piece, and surely not possible to carry around in your pocket, rather it’s like a travel bag thing.

Specs and features
It comes with a Main processor called the ARM CortexTM-A8, 32 bit, 600 MHz and an additional 32 bit DSP @ 430 MHz. The RAM memory 128 MB Double Data Rate SDRAM). The model we received has hard drive capacity of 320 GB. There is also a 160 GB one available. The OS is Linux-based, and Wi-Fi hardware supports 802.11 b/g. The browser is an Opera-based one, which supports Adobe Flash, but one needs to register the product once purchased to receive it free.

Out of the box, it plays a really vast set of formats in audio and video, like MP3, WMA, WMA pro 5.1, WAV, Flac, OGG Vorbis for audio, and for video we have WMV, and MPEG 4 ASP meaning DivX/XviD, and M-JPEG. Now start the woes of this player. For HD files you have to download and pay for an extra plugin for 720p file support in both WMV and MPEG4. The paid add-ons don’t end there. For recording voice there is a hardware add-on required, that is not free. Thus Voip out of the box is not happening. Then there is a DVR station which they sell separately that allows you to record any video or audio you watch on the Archos. I’m not too happy with this, these things should be included if the product is touted as premium. One last thing, but useful thing, is the player reads PDF files, thus one can read e-books while traveling. The big screen will aid that.

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Performance - Web browsing and navigation

The UI is very well designed, and touch screen also has no issues. We were using our fingers for everything, and due to the large icons and colorful menus, navigation is easy. For the web, a few small iffys come up, but web browsing too is easy overall. Obviously first one has to go to the settings and set up Wi-Fi, and if you need to type a key you have to go to advanced settings. Then on it detects fast and simply. While browsing, you cannot go to the address bar directly, one has to click the top menu icon and use “go to”, but then the QWERTY touch screen keypad is very good. It’s well laid out due to the screen size, no problems in thumb typing there. You have to double click the screen to enlarge the browser, and in YouTube etc you can make the web video fit the screen exactly.

There is one feature called the media club, where Archos connects you to partner servers for free music to download and paid games and movies. Paying for downloadable movies I understand, but not for the plugins and add ons that I mentioned in the previous section.

Performance-Audio and video

This is the section where the player just simply excels. The screen can be set to medium backlight, and then on doesn’t need to be tweaked. The video playback of SD files is really good, we watched files ranging from 3gp clips to a backed up DivX DVD rip of I am Legend. The video was smooth, no motion blur issues, plus colors were pretty accurate. Then for audio we added Flac files and MP3s both, obviously having more fun while listening to the former.

We were playing some instrumental Bebop, and the sound was loud and crisp on the high end, but in perfect control. But, this was on our own Shure earphones, not the bundled stuff. Those are bad, just like every other PMP manufacturer does today. I believe one needs to invest in a good pair of in-ears to get the best sound of a good player.

Finally battery life of this player is quite respectable. I used the medium backlight mode, and got about 6 hours straight of browsing and also watching a flick.

Conclusion
So this is the issue: At a price of Rs. 39,000 I feel everything should be included in the product, hardware and software plugin-wise. There are many who can afford this price range, so I’m not going to harp on the price being high (which it is), BUT, why are we being charged these 20 dollar payments for extra add ons. The price is large enough to include everything. The product is great. Whatever it does, it does brilliantly, a cut above the rest for sure. So if you have a heavy wallet and need a really cool slick player while flying around, Archos 7 is for you.