Customer Reviews

Archos 400 30 GB Pocket Media Assistant (PMA430)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

FIRST LOOK: GOOD
That aside, I am quite pleased with this device. Right out of the box the weigh and construction of it felt right; some might find the 9.9 oz weight a bit hefty, but I prefer sturdiness over a light, plastic casing. And it looks sharp too, though I wish Archos would leave its 1970's tech school logo behind once and for all.

SET-UP: GOOD
Setting the device up was easier than I anticipated, though the amount of wires involved along with the stiff docking cable to power/connect the PMA430 to the dock were bothersome, though all work well. I have average to good skill with Audio/Video hook-ups and it took me only 15 minutes to get the device running and ready to record. However, there are some rather odd quirks that keep me from giving this a GREAT rating (for instance, resetting the time/date is a major hassel, and for no aparent reason)

VIDEO RECORDING: GREAT
My friend Michael has been eager to get his massive Dr. Who collection off VHS tape and into a digital format, so we started playing with the PMA430 there. The set-up was easy after the initial one and we were recording within minutes. And even though there is a natural less then DVD quality about recording from tape, I was still very impressed with both the picture and sound that it captured from my VCR. We soon switched to digital cable as the recording media and were left with a DVD quality recording of the Simpsons. So far, so good...

NOTE: For whatever reason (read: to avoid crippling lawsuits), Archos has decided that once programming has been recorded onto your device, that is the end of the line. No burning movies to DVD. No transferring files onto a laptop or sharing with your friends. That is fair; intellectual property rights do need to be protected, but it is still bothersome to those of us who just want to back up some of our legitimate purchases.

PDA FUNCTIONALITY: FAIR
Now, not everything is good about this device. The PDA functionality is awkward at best, slow and unresponsive at its worst. The lag time between clicking an icon and the activation of the program (or even the expanding of a simple file tree) is slow and arduous. I must have clicked through a dozen applications because I though the screen had not registered my tapping. Also, the writing capture (when the PDA screen actually translates letters you are jotting down) is so poor it is nearly unusable. Maybe this will change with a Firmware update. Right now, I just use the integrated keyboard, or the optional rubber USB keyboard that you can roll up and tuck away when finished.

UPDATE: Okay, I have had a little more time with the device and gotten somewhat used to its speed, and it is reacting much better now, so no more "POOR" rating. However, it is still a very clumsy, unintuitive PDA design.

MP3 PLAYER: GOOD
Simple and functional, complete with an equalizer (though a rather anemic one with only 5 sliders) and functionality that will automatically index your songs according to author, song title, genre, etc. This works well, but is nowhere as functional as a flywheel on an iPod, but still easy enough to use. I was also surprised to see that on legitimate MP3s you are frequently show the album cover along with the song. That's a nice little touch.

SOUND: FAIR
The small front speaker is laughable at best. I cannot imagine anytime where it would be used, as it would annoy both the user and anyone around him with its mono, tinny sound. The sound improves greatly when headphones are used, and the ones that come with the PMA430 are good enough, if a tad uncomfortable.

WIRELESS: GOOD
This was one of the nicest functions about the device. I already have a wireless network at home and locking into the signal was quick and painless. The PMA430 uses an Opera browser for surfing the internet and Microsoft Outlook for email. Again, both were easy to get set-up and running within 15 minutes. There is also support for wireless access through a cellular provider, but I have not tried that out yet.

PHOTOS: FAIR
Eh...I mean, its there. You can look at photos, even display them on another TV screen. However, any television that is capable of making digital photographs not look like crap probably has a memory card slot anyway. And just viewed on the PMA430, pictures just look okay. And I don't take a lot of pictures, nor do any of my friends. So, moving on...

BATTERY LIFE: GOOD
Decent. I am getting about 8-9 hours out of it purely as a MP3 player, and about half that if I am using the video playback or browsing the web (anything that involves the screen being on, really).

SYNCHING: FAIR
A few problems here that were not helped much by the grossly inadequate PMA430 User's Guide, but I eventually stumbled my way through it. The PMA430 comes with a 2.0 USB hub, allowing me to quickly transcribe all my MP3s, video clips and pictures onto the device. With a few free downloads you can even have the device synch with your desktop copy of Outlook. There is an infrared port to beam informant, but sadly no Bluetooth support, which eliminates such novelties as wireless headphones and some advanced networking. Drat.

Other problems with synching are minor but truly annoying. Every time I synch, the date and time change buy a few weeks/hours or more. I have no idea why this happens. Also, the Archos is supposed to work in synch with Yahoo! TV to allow you to set a schedule to record your shows. I am beginning to believe that there is actually no way to make this work.

SOFTWARE: GOOD
The software that comes with the PMA430 are useable enough, but I am eager to see what new titles will be released, and if there will be a Firmware update to handle some of the outstanding bugs I have noticed with the PDA functionality.

The PMA430 is the size of a PDA but a little thicker. Not much though. It has a nice big screen, so the bigger size is worth it. And this is the only PDA you can buy at the moment with a 30 Gig hard drive. And the only PDA with built in video recording. So you can get videos on it without a computer. That makes things much eaasier.

It has Wi-Fi, which I have used at my home to surf the internet from any where in my house. And I have connected to my companies Wi-Fi network at work.

It is seen as a hard drive when you connect it with USB. So you can just drop files, liekl say MP3 fiels on it. And once you have MP3s on it, it will create playlists automatically for them. So it is very easy to play music. Movies are very easy to play too. And it automatically puts bookmarks in movies to mark your last position. Great if you want to watch a two hour movie but only have say fifteen minuites at a time.

It also has built in photo viewer. I tried it with my 6.3 megapixel photos straight from my camera. No problem, and I didn't have to resize them.

Also it has a USB host port. That means that if your camera supports it you can plug your camera directly into the PMA430 and download pictures directly into it. Great for vacations. Not only can you view pictures this way, but you can store them, so you don't need to bring five memory cards for the trip...

And since it is a USB host port, if your camera doesn't support it, just connect a USB card reader and put your cameras card in that. Not only that but USB keyboards can be plugged into it. Now you don't need a special keyboard for your PDA. Just so you don't get confused, there are two USB ports, one is USB host (like the one on your computer) and one is regular USB 2.0 (like on your camera)

It also has the usual Contacts, calendar, to do, calculator, email, etc. And it can sync to Outlook. (I haven't used that though since I don't use Outlook).

It comes with several games. And it can play the Morphun game standard for more games. And I expect mroe games will come otu for this, it is running a Linux version afterall. Since i mentioned it, soon they will release the software developers kit so that any one can create programs for it.

As for video recording,w ell it comes with a dockign cradle. You can put teh PMA430 in it at 60 degree or 90 degree angle. The cradle has video and audio in and out and even has s-video in. Adn it has a IR Port on the front. The PMA ships with a big full size (TV style) remote control. Oh, did I mention the PMA430 can display on the TV? It can display full screen. So you can sit on the couch and watch a video fromt he PMA430. And the PMA430 can play and record at better then TV quality. I think 720 or 740 by something. Or of course you can go lower in resolution.

You can also set up delayed recordings. So at 8PM you can record channel 13. And it has a IR blaster. With that you can set it so that at 8PM it changes the cable box or satelite dish or VCR, to change to channel 13. And of course once you have it, you cna fast forward through comercials.

You can buy a travel AV cable. This is the audio video cable only, without the docking station. This is made for when you travel so you don't need to carry much to view on TV. But with it you can also carry a small camera that runs off a 9 volt battery and turn the PMA430 into a camcorder. Soemone already did it at Cebit. Here is a link - www.i4u.com/article3032.html

The built in Opera web browser is good for surfing the web. It will even format teh web page so it is single column so that you don't need to scroll sideways on the web page, just scroll down. adn it will change text size easily. You can switch between two sizes.

Oh, and the unit is multitasking. That means you can listen to music and type a document. Or listen to music and view photos. etc.

I have seen some say well this is just a PDA with a hard drive. They don't know about many of the other features. This does so much, I am sure I have forgotten some things.

Any way, my review, well I love this thing. It does so much. In fatc I seems to learn new things it can do every day. For example just today i learned that the USB host port can supply power. Some one is using it to power one of those SIIG FM transmitters. So now he can listen to his MP3s on his stereo and he doesn't need extra batteries or DC power in the car. Gee maybe I will plug in a USB fan for the hot summer months.

OK, now for the negative things. This is a small computer with a hard drive. As such sometimes you have to wait for it to read things off the hard drive. Just like with my desktop. Also the unti is new and has some bugs in it. But I expect that will smooth out a lot with firmware. In fact one small problem I reported, they have said is fixed in the next firmware. But I haven't had that many problems. And as is I love it. This is a pocket PC, no er, pocket Tivo, no its a camcorder(just need a cheap camera, see ebay), no game boy, no its ....

The other reviews are mostly accurate and fair but you may want to know about a couple of important "gotchas". After 3 months of evaluating alternative devices (iPOD, Epson, dedicated external drive, etc.), indecision and refinement of my "requirements", I bought and I will keep the Archos PMA430. All of the conventional PDA features, music and video work very well. The Wi-Fi works up to about 25-30 ft from my Microsoft MN-500 wireless base station at home. I still need to go out in public to see how well it might work at, say, Panera or Starbucks. But the USB host mode (for digital cameras, etc) has limitations. First, you need to have the PMA430 on external power to get it to connect to a USB device like an external hard drive or thumb drive. Otherwise it just sits there and you get no indication that it IS or ISN'T doing anything. After long connection times (yes, I decided to wait it out) it gives a cryptic error message. But, connect it to external power and it quickly detected my 20GB Buslink external hard drive and my 512MB Kingston thumb drive. That means when you're away from home, you're gonna need the cigarette lighter adapter if you plan to connect through this port. The USB Host port will not connect to my Canon EOS 20D nor will it connect to my (sample of 1) USB Compact Flash reader. I plan to try others but if this port is important to your buying decision, I recommend "try before you buy". This renders the USB Host port useless for extending my camera's in the field storage space. The opposite function, connecting the PMA430 to a computer's USB port works flawlessly!

For me, the delays reported for start up of the individual applications was not an issue once you know it's going to happen. You simply adapt to it and it's a pretty short delay. My character recognition was excellent (I had the latest OS 1.13-2). The music is awesome! The video is great. The "sync" is a bit awkward but no worse for me than the first few times I used my old Palm Pilot. When you remove the battery, the internal clock seems to reset to 8AM on 16 May '05 for some reason (mfg date maybe). The pen is indeed flimsy and the cover kinda cheesy. All in all, I'm satisfied with my purchase and expect that a later revision in the OS is likely to overcome the USB Host port issue. When you plot function versus cost for a dedicated hard drive ($250-ish), iPOD ($350-ish) and high quality PDA ($500-ish) the PMA430 offered the most bang-for-the-buck against my "needs" and I CAN carry it in my shirt pocket without significant problem.
If you want a recommendation to wait or buy, I recommend buy if these things don't intimidate you, otherwise wait for a "next-gen" device.

UPDATE:
Purchased a Promaster CompactFlash USB2.0 reader. Connects without need for external power, and strangely, neither do the two USB devices that previously did. I'm now happy that I can get around the lack of camera recognition by the simple expedient of taking along the USB reader.

Wonder if I can figure out how to get it to brew up a cup of tea?

Negatives - Script -hand writing recognition - is poor at best.
Touch function seems to work sometime and not work others, have not found a work around and have had to reboot several times.
Ads say 120 hours of video, haven't done this yet, but from direct downloads of movies from DVD player to PMA 430, have 17 movies on PMA, with roughly 65% disk space used. Believe to achieve 120 hours have to download movies to computer and then recompress using MPEG4 compression.
On video player, left sidebar different from rest of machine, should be on right.
Find that MUTE button works sometimes after shutdown and restart, other doesn't work and have to reset it.
Touch interfacing seems to be clutzy.
Owner's manuals less than informative... obviously written by an engineer and then translated to English.
Accessories shipping from Archos is pricey
Many of items above can be fixed with firmware updates.
Cables are like an octopus- too many- bought the traveling attachment to overcome this.
POSITIVES: This is an amazing device for the size. I looked at the AV420 and waited for the PMA 400/430 to come out. I have enjoyed using it...
WiFi and internet easy to set up and good, PDA functions basic, very basic. Transfer of files from PC easy.
Battery life not yet tested.
For those that want to keep movies handy and for travel, this is a great device.
Would make this a really super device with small video camera.

The box says PMA430, but the unit says PMA400. Whatever you call it, it's amazing. It's extremely easy to hook up to the cable box and record TV shows. The quality is surprising. Also, no problems using the USB to download the shows to my computer and watch them. Amazon shipped mine 2/23 and I got it the next day. Haven't encountered any problems yet!

Bought the PMA 430 for about 2 weeks now. Setting up the recording was fairly simple, took about 5 minutes following the instructions to get it to play out and record whatever was showing on tv, satellite tv and dvd. The recorded items are very clear and viewable on the PMA screen. Audio is not too good but listenable playing out from the built in speakers but extremely clear via the supplied earphones.

Connecting to the PC was easy. So is the transferring of whatever files from the PC to the PMA.

Setting up internet connection via WIFI hotspot was easy. I did not even have to look at the instructions to figure it out. Connection speed was good and a lot better than via my NOKIA 7710. Screen shot for internet is readable but not made for long hours surfing. The touch screen's response time is way faster than my symbian Nokia 7710.

Overall am very pleased with my purchase and have been very fearful to buy this product after reading some of the online reviews. Safe to say my PMA 430 has been without any problems at all. (Touch wood) Infact it has not even hung once unlike my turtle slow NOKIA 7710.

After using the Archos PMA 430 for a few weeks now I am still excited to use it daily. It must be the new toy affect. The video/audio playback are tremendous. The transferring of files and ease of use with the product is what I love about it. And the TV playback and recording are great.

The only drawbacks are the basic interface design and the PDA functions are functional but not outstanding compared to other traditional PDA's. And the device does freeze from time-to-time if it is overed but not much different from other PDA devices.

Overall, it's the best portable device I have used and the overall value is tremendous.

I think Archos should continue manufacturing this model... it is very reliable and ENTERTAINING

Product: Archos PMA400 (430)

This company is horrible.

I can guartentee you 3 things if you purchase this unit:

1) You will have a problem within the first week of ownership.

2) The tech support will attempt to solve ALL problems by telling you to reformat the unit and install the operating system again. THIS IS THERE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING! EVRYTHING!!!

3) I gaurentee you the tech suport suggestion of reformatting the harddrive will NOT fix your problem.


My first unit was defective - the new unit will not record audio.

Not a complete waste of $650 because the video recording has worked well on the second unit - but when you pay this much for something EVERYTHING should work.

Great concept - poor technology.