Archos 104 4GB MP3 and WMA Digital Music Player and Photo Viewer, Grey (500852)

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Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 4 x 1 x 2 inches ; 2.9 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000F5NJ1C
• Item model number: 500852
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #33,671 in Electronics (See Bestsellers in Electronics)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 1, 2006

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description
With the Archos 500852 104 4GB MP3 and WMA Digital Music Player and Photo Viewer (Silver), you can take your best music and pictures with you wherever you go. The perfect companion for everything from long trips to short bus rides, from going to parties to just hanging out around the house, the Archos 104 lets you not only take your favorite moments with you, but helps you make new favorite moments wherever you happen to be.

Of course, the main purpose of the Archos 104 is to play music. Because it has a real hard disk inside of it with four gigabytes of memory, you can store up to 2,000 songs in WMA format at 64kbps, or up to 1,000 songs in higher quality MP3 format at 128kbps. This unit comes able to play not just MP3 and WMA files, but protected WMA files, and even uncompressed WAV files at full CD quality. You can even play iTunes on your Archos 104 by downloading the proper update from the Archos website, and as new audio formats are created, future updates will also be made available on the manufacturer's website so your Archos will continue to support the newest and best audio formats. Using a standard audio cable, you can also play your music through a home entertainment system, allowing you to bring your entire CD collection with you anywhere, and play it over anyone's sound system.

Putting music on your Archos 104 is as easy as dragging and dropping any of your unprotected music files. For protected, purchased music from PlaysForSure web sites, it's as easy as clicking the Sync button in Windows Media Player. With its USB 2.0 high speed port, transfers are finished before you know it, and the internal battery gets recharged at the same time. The Archos 104 is also ID3 compatible, meaning that the ARCLibrary will sort your music so that you can listen to it by artist, album, title, year, or genre, or just click on shuffle and listen to your music at random. The ID3 tagging also lets you view the CD jacket cover for any of your music while you are listening to it.

With your Archos 104 you can also store and view up to 40,000 photos in JPEG2 or VGA format on the built-in, 1.5-inch OLED color display screen. The use of OLED (organic liquid-crystal display) technology with its smaller carbon-based molecules, creates a screen that is brighter, thinner, lighter, and faster than normal LCD displays, providing you with not only a smaller player, but a screen that is more easily viewed in bright lighting conditions, and at greater angles. All you need to do is transfer pictures from your computer to your Archos 104, and you'll be able to easily look at them in high quality, wherever you are.

Finally, you can always use the Archos 104 as a portable hard drive to carry important files with you. You can even use the Archos' intuitive double-browser to easily organize, rename, create, copy, move, and delete files and folders, as well as creating your own playlists from the music you already have stored. You can also autosync with Windows Media Player 10 to quickly and easily transfer your songs and your playlists from your PC.

The Archos 104 has a built-in line-out jack as well as its stereo analog earphone output. This unit is not only has a USB 2.0 port, but is backwards compatible with USB 1.1 as well, and can be used with either a PC or a Mac. The built-in rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery provides you with up to 13 hours of music playback or picture viewing, and is not only recharged via the USB 2.0 connection, but can be charged via an optional power charger as well. Firmware updates can be downloaded from www.archos.com so your Archos is always up to date and running at its best. This unit comes in a stylish silver color, and is eminently portable, weighing only 2.8 ounces, and measuring approximately 1.7 x 3.6 x 0.5 inches (W x H x D).

What's in the Box
Archos 104 digital music player, 1 x USB 2.0 cable, 1 x pair of stereo headphones, a quick-start guide (with a full user's manual preloaded on the 104's hard drive, and available for download as a PDF to your PC), and a neck strap.

Product Description
ARCHOS presents the new ARCHOS 104, a miniature 4GB MP3 player features a 1.5" color screen and JPEG photo viewer. With ARCHOS 104 you can store up to 1,000 songs or 40,000 photos in the palm of your hand.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars not bad, July 13, 2007

By	Gerald L. Springs "old school R&B MAN" (Charlotte, NC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

i purchased this player on july 9,2007 and recieved it on july 11, it is a nice player every thing worked right, i had problems getting the album art on the player, you really have to buy some good headphones because the headphones that come with it are not that good and don't get loud enough in my opinion i have two good suggestions for headphones, (radioshack pro 35a $20.00 rich deep bass great headphones for the price) (philips he592 these are in ear style headphones that i purchased at a drug store called cvs these won some kind of award they claim to be surround sound they are also around $20.00 these headphones really make a differece in the sound of the player

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Repeat Archos buyer, January 8, 2008

By	S. Moore "sln2789" (Pittsburgh, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

We had purchased an Archos DVR in the past and loved it, so that is why I chose this brand for our MP3 player. I also have a Sanyo and have had problems loading song titles properly. There have been no problems with the Archos...other than purchasing better headphones, which seems to be a problem with any player we have ever bought. Great product for the price!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pretty good for a cheap MP3 player, August 28, 2007

By	M. Jose (New Windsor, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've had a chance to use it for a month, and remembered to update the firmware to the latest version from the Archos website. (N.B. you really should do this first, after saving the files, because I found that the internal disk needed to be reformatted after the firmware upgrade).

The unit behaves as advertised and the UI is reasonably snappy (when it's not waiting for a 2-second disk spin-up). The OLED display is almost usable in bright sunlight, but adequate everywhere else; photos are a bit grainy on it. I bought the unit for its bookmarking capability, which works exactly as it should. The separate charger input is very handy when not around a computer -- the power jack matches the plug-and-voltage of many wall-warts being made today. File write speed to the unit is about 1 MB/s, not unreasonable.

Biggest complaints: The firmware sometimes falls down on certain files, seeming to "hang" while reading them for a long time. Archos decided to make this unit run on closed-source firmware, so future fixes for this misbehavior are highly unlikely.

I gave it 4 stars because it does nearly all of what's promised, for a cheap package; and because I have the perspective of using some truly badly-designed personal electronics in the past.