Before we begin, I am going to warn all of you, stopping you right here by saying avoid this mp3 player at all costs. It isn't worth 25% of the list price. This thing is on the level of the cheap knock off touch mp3 players you see, the no name brands for like $30 on ebay. I am not even going to snap photos of it, in fear of my camera catching a cold. So, I will just list the atrocities that come with this player. Please feel free to read on if you wish, if not, nobody will blame you.
First, note that I enjoy reviewing things. It's a fun hobby. I like testing new electronics just for the experiences. In this case, I was actually looking to replace my sansa fuze. I saw the new fuze touch, which was poorly rated and decided to shop around for small, touch mp3 player supporting flac and video. Well I saw this on best buy for $99 and decided to give it a lol...i mean give it a go. ( my archos 160gb tablet melted itself a few months ago, I knew this thing was going to fail and fail hard. But, alas I am an addict, I must try it.
It looks really nice and seems built of nice exterior parts, feels very solid and not at all cheap. Calibration was the first F grade I gave it, literally within the first 10 seconds it received a failure rating for the amount of pressure needed to tap the tiny little +'s that appear on the screen. 5 minutes later the unit turns on and I am greeted with a beautiful screen. Sad to say, I really enjoy it. It looked sexy. People who reviewed the unit said they had trouble getting to the 2nd home screen where settings menus are. All of them are dumb. Thats really all I have to say. They were trying to swish the little touch home button at the bottom of the unit, instead of the screen itself. When you touch left to right on the screen, that menu appears perfectly. ALL of the reviewers I read about or saw used the home touch button...there is no left and right touch ability on that button, its just a touch sensitive area to get to the home screen...
The unit BRICKED IN LESS THAN 5 minutes of opening the box and adding some music and videos. I transferred an mp4 video to it and it immediately bricked. It would not shut off and after reading the guide manual it seems there was a tiny little hole on the back for a hard reset using a toothpick. Okay, so i tried that. Nothing. Pushed the toothpick in a little harder, still nothing. I had to push at an uncomfortable level to get the reset button working. Reset it and added my media again minus the .mp4 videos.
well, the menu set up looks great and browsing is pretty great, its similar to the Samsung p3 and p2. Album art takes a few seconds to appear in the list view. About 10 minutes into my listening session, the player froze. Another hard reboot came soon after. You can get up to 5 playlists and songs are easy to add into it. Everything inside the menu setup works just fine, there is dynamic scrolling. As the video reviews only showed off the dumb scroll wheel emulator. You can shut that off...thank god. Dynamic scrolling is choppy and odds are strong you will accidentally touch it the wrong way or with a part of your finger and select a song while you are scrolling. It happens all the time and you cant avoid it.
Video quality is the worst Ive ever seen on any mp3 player. Ive owned knock off ipods that cost me 10$ that have better video quality. This is about 10fps, and blurry. VERY blurry. Picture quality is okay, nothing special. You can set your own pictures at the home screen and it looks really nice.
The player is the 3cam version, so you can record video and take pictures. Well...you know those hannah montana type toy video cameras you would see kids play with? Those are about the same quality. 320 x140 or something dumb like that. It is truly horrid. Video is a staggering 10 frames a second or worse. I recorded my hand and wiggled my fingers slowly...it could not keep up and was not fast enough to play things smoothly or catch all the fingers wiggling around.
Having said that, it has some nice qualities inside the menu. The menu setup is great, I wish other players looked that nice.
But this player is one of the worst mp3 players you can buy. Maxed volume isn't enough to listen at "comfortable" levels even with the stock earbuds, which actually arent bad at all.
This unit gets a 2/10 and i am way too lazy to go upstairs and get my camera just to make this review a little nicer. Archos doesn't deserve it. They've yet to make a decent mp3 player. My last archos 160gb tablet literally melted a few months ago >.>
-no micro sd support in 2010...what is this 1995?
-bricks easy and freezes often
-touch screen is decent at best, no where near a zune or ipods level
-the lowest frame rates ive ever seen for video cap and playback
-reset button could use could actually cause damage due to the pressure needed
Archos...what the heck? seriously...
Edited by swbf2cheater - 11/16/10 at 10:17pm
