Customer Reviews

Archos 605 Wi-Fi Portable Media Player (4 GB)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Sometimes you buy something and you spend alot of money and just
don't feel like you have gotten your moneys worth or don't use it
enough to justify to yourself the purchase.
Well, for me, the Archos device is just about the best purchase
that I have ever made. It is just incredible. I literally use it
every day. I take it on the train. I take it backpacking. I watch
TV in bed before going to sleep. I even watch it at work occasionally.
I really have no complaints whatsoever on this device!
I previously purchased the Archos 604 30GB model. And yes, I bought
all the plugins... This purchase was for the Wifi and higher resolution
than my 604. After firmware upgrade it has worked flawlessly.
Everything else on the device is just great.
Let me say that I purchased the video iPod and the video itself looks
great but it is SO SMALL! The screen size on this is perfect.
I actually went thru alot of pain to get VIDEO ON THE IPOD!
Well, this baby will play alot of formats the ipod will not. mpeg2,
vob, avi, mpeg4. Just buy the plugins and you are good to go.
Yes, its a little more expense.. blah blah blah
To do movie conversion I use Nero Recoder for ipod (mpeg4).
For TV shows I used bittorrent. :) Legally of course :)
Somehow there are alot of negative comments about the device.
I don't understand. I've had the 604 for about 6 months and still
rave about it. The 605 is just as nice.
If you don't own one already I'd recommend getting the 30GB one
if you can afford it. The flash is nice for expansion but is
slower for copying files to the device. Flash is getting much
cheaper (2GB SD card for ~$20 now...) though.
Anyway, if you want to watch video get the Archos. If you want
a music player buy an iPod. If you want people to think you have
money buy an iTouch.
Hope my comments were useful to you. If you buy it and are
dissappointed I will be too.

The following is added after having the unit for over a month:
- I still love it
- Never had ANY problems playing video
- Never had ANY problems playing music
- Lockup has occurred using Web Browser. They are not frequent
and I am assuming that Archos will continue to make the
product more robust with Opera. They have yet to release
the widgets so my guess is that they are working on it.
So... still very happy with Web Browser
- Complaints about having special cable are goofy (see iPod cable)
- The Media Server option is GREAT! I have a Maxtor NAS drive
which supports uPnP so I don't have to copy stuff onto the
device itself. For shows > 1hr I copy them to the device because
the fast forward does not work with the media server. (If you
use PC and share then use the file browser, it does)
All being said, I would lower the stars to 4.5 because of the lockups
during Web Browsing. Hope the additional comments help you.
Thanks

Update on Dec 11:
New firmware makes the device even better. Haven't seen any lockups
using the webbrowser. And now it supports flash games. OK OK... so
the CPU is not that powerful and it won't play alot of games to
satisfaction but it does play the cards games just fine.
Anyway... Yes yes yes... you have to buy plugins for the webbrowser
and if you want to play some different formats... Just figure an
extra 50 dollars. But again.. if you want to watch VIDEO then this
IS the device for you. If you want music then there are ALOT of
better mp3 players out there. And the complaints about video conversion..
well, 1 plugin buys you anything you would watch on the ipod.
Like I said above.. sorry if you don't like it.

Got this as a christmas present for my daughter (13 yrs)... yes, I realized up front that they nickle and dime you for capabilities... but knowing that up front made it less upsetting, as I mentally added the prices when deciding what to get. I got her the 4 Gig 605, Dock, 4 GB SDHC and the internet plug it... right at $320 for the whole group. So far everything has worked flawlessly... we have played movies on my 50" Sony TV and it looks great... WIFI works throughout the home and the remote allows a 'useable' internet experience on the TV. Watching recorded TV/Movies has made trips in the car fun for her. All-in-all a blast of a 'toy'. Works great with an external drive, so I am confused why anyone would buy the HD versions unless you MUST have access on the road to many movies at once. Otherwise, use a stand-alone HD as your 'home base', and drag movies to the SD card or player as needed. Multiple SD cards allows near limitless viewing on the road, and the knowledge that your hard-drive will never crash on you (since it doesn't have one!). I have an Archos AV500 that has served me faithfully commuting for years... now I REALLY wish it would die so I can upgrade to one of these things! Only negatives (similar to AV500, so I am used to it) are on the MP3 side... pretty lame music-player software. That being said, it works fine for MP3s and I think they have the best VIDEO software/ hardware on the market. This thing is a steal at under $200 for the base unit.

I bought this product refurbished. I chose the 4GB flash model over the Hardrive based models for several reasons:

1. Fragility of hard drives. I'd be more reluctant to take the player with me if I there was a chance I'd drop it.
2. Battery. Archos says this and the hard drive models have the same battery life, however I felt that there had to be some improvement since no moving parts.
3. Flash memeory is so cheap now and this supports SDHC so you can put 8 or 16 GB SD cards in it.
4. I like the idea of being able to put movies on the device without needing the proprietary (BOO) USB cable. I simply put my SD card into my laptop and load/offload any files I want. This also seems to transfer alot faster than when I use the USB cable. ~2 min for 1Gig to the card versus ~9minutes when using the USB cable.

Once I actually received the device I was surprised at the size, It's smaller than it looks in the pictures and I find myself putting it in my pocket and taking it with me quite often. All i wanted to do was play around with my new toy, but I had to charge it completly via the USB cable which took ~14 hours. One thing that you should do if you buy this item is immediately update the firmware. Mine had 1.35xxx and the most current is 2.10xxx. Its easy to do, you just have to download the file from [...] and transfer it to the main directory on the player. So I upgraded my firmware and then I put some music on a SD card I had laying around and put it in the device and turned it on. The device came up with a white screen and basically the device had to be reflashed again. This happened 3 times over the first day I was using it. At this point I'm starting to worry that maybe this thing is a piece of garbage, until I realized I had a bad SD card. It was a 1gig, but whenever I formatted it it only read 847MB free. So after using a different SD card now I have had absolutely no problems.

Pros:
Size, Screen size, flash capabilities of the web browser, wifi (but the browser is $30), ease of use, photo viewer is fantastic, you can put Flash games on it which is a great feature. The screen seems pretty scratch resistant. uPNP capabilites so you can pull up any shared media on your home PC while on you home WiFi network.

Cons:
Great browser, but $30 seems a little steep, $10-$15 seems more reasonable. Extremly slow charging time thru USB ~10 hours (which is the only way to charge it unless you buy one of the docking cradles, they have several varities which all cost $$$) Slow boot time, You can't play music while using the Flash games or browsing the web. The silver finish on the bezel around the screen scratches easily. The white finish on the back shows wear easily. Wish the touchscreen was more sensitive, at first I was afraid I would break it because you have to touch kind of hard.

Summary:
Great product, great feature set, be prepared to shell out some $$ to pimp it out fully.

I have had the unit for about a month now. I purchased the 4GB SD model and a separate 16GB SD add-on card for a total of 20GB. I also purchased the DVR station and the DVR traveler.

My excuse, err reason for purchasing it was primarily to be able to do digital recordings from an infrared camera to post online. Additionally, I wanted to convert my existing 8MM camcorder tapes to digital and do DVR type recordings for entertainment.

The unit seemed to recognize the SD card just fine (I read that they were finicky with some cards). The picture is very clear, the interface and touch screen are fairly intuitive and not difficult to learn and I was able connect to my secure wireless network easily.

The unit does have a bad habit of freezing up whether the SD card is installed or not. It's been a long time since I purchased an electronic device that I had to stick a paper clip into on a regular basis to reset it. Perhaps they should have included a paperclip holder along with the stylus holder that they forgot to build into the unit.

The biggest issue that I have with the unit is that when I am recording from another device (e.g., camcorder, infrared camera, etc.) the unit will at some point decide that the source is DRM protected and restarts the recording in protected mode. These recording are effectively useless as they can't be played on anything but the Archos itself. Note that the source being recorded is original and not copy protected in any way. It takes an average of 3 attempts just to get one good recording, very frustrating when you are 2 hours into a recording when it decides to do this. This is an example where DRM adds no value and causes major headaches for consumers. You are forced to pay for something that cripples the legitmate use of the device. Because of their dumb DRM implementation, the device is nearly useless for my primary purpose for acquiring it.

On to the "DVR" station. Very wishful thinking to call this a DVR station as it has no ability to tune a station and has to rely on your cable or satellite box to set the station at the right time. The unit has an infrared emitter which is supposed to allow it to control these other device. I have no idea if it works, because you must first download programming data from the Archos website. Guess what? the Archos website doesn't work either. After trying numerous times to download programming data, I sent an inquiry to customer support. After a few days, I got a reply saying that they were having server problems and it should be back up in 1 day, 2 max. That was 3 weeks ago. Customer Service hasn't responded to my followup. So scratch this DVR concept (a TIVO it certainly is not) and consider the DVR station to be an expensive docking station / charger.

Hey, you know the other stuff that they advertise: browser functionality, video playback and widgets? Well you have to buy add-ins before you can use any of them. You cannot play back DVDs until after you purchase additional codecs from them. Given the few things that seem to work as advertised in the base unit, I'm just not very anxious to buy a bunch add-ins for functions that should work out of the box and set myself up to be disappointed even further.

Unless you really have a need to do portable digital video recording from analog sources via RCA connectors like I do, I'd say skip this and buy something else.

It's sad because the device had so much potential.

I have to say that when I first got this product, loaded some movies on it, they wouldn't play and required the plug ins. If you are going to buy this product and don't want to spend countless hours converting movies, you will want to make sure you account for spending and extra $30-$70 in plug ins to make this a great full featured device. Now that I have the Web Browser and two audio and video plug ins, this thing is WONDERFUL. Browsing the internet was snappy and easy. Movies played smooth and audio was good, yet a little on the quiet side.

MOST IMPORTANT. Next I bought an 8gb SD card to use with it. It was a transcend which is supposed to be compatible with this player. by the way, they don't tell you, but there are a LOT of SD cards that just will not work with this player! In fact, mine actually bricked my player. Finally after hours of screwing around trying to reinstall the Operating Sytem and hours searching the internet for solutions, I finally got it to work. If you own one of these players, it is essential to go to Archosfans.com and check the forums. This is by far, not an iPod when it comes to just anyone being able to use it. At least that is my experience.

I really don't see what people are complaining about, this product is amazing. The internet plug in works great and connects to all of the wifi networks I have tried which includes both WPA and WPA2 without a problem. I am really impressed with the speed and easy of use of the internet on this device. Also the video playback is amazing. I personally don't like Ipods, this device is far more cableable at a much more reasonable price. The archos portal works great and I downloaded and installed my internet plugin as soon as I paid for it, no problem what so ever. Firmware updates are a snap. Battery life seems to be around 15.5 hours for music playback and about 3.5-4 for video. Keep in mind it takes about 8-9 hours to charge the device via usb but only about 4 to charge via ac adapter (sold sep) Great product overall

I have been using the device for a number of months now and while it does have its issues, it is still an awesome device.
It has become a money pit tho also, since it was only 4gb internal, id reccomend atleast another 4gb or larger sd card. For most people you can stop right there but to unlock all the functionality you need to but other things. Internet access, 30$, Playback of AC3 audio from dvdrips, and H264 files from say itunes, 20$ each, it can work as a dvr, the dvr station dock is 90$, battery life averages about 4.5hours sometimes you need longer so i got a battery pack, 50$, case so the screen is protected, 20$, and thats not everything ive gotten
so it can add up quickly, be careful of this fact, otherwise i do not regret this purchase at all

Update: 3 and a half years after i first wrote this review... it sits in my drawer because I use other devices instead... :P

I have a video ipod and my wife was wanting the new ipod touch for Christmas. I remembered that there used to be a company that sold mp3 players in the stores but had disappeared. I looked them up to see what they still offered. Low and behold, Archos had this great little video/music player. I immediately scoured the internet to see what else I could find about it. I checked my online computer sources like CNet and they gave it a roaring review.

I went ahead and bought it for Christmas. It works fantastic - the video is phenomenal, the built-in speakers are great, and it's very easy to use. I didn't like that I had to buy a browser plug-in to view webpages online but I knew that going in so it was no surprise. I love that you can use the camera memory cards to keep more music/video/photos on. Eventually, you'll be able to buy 32 Gig cards to use with it. You can't use those on the ipods.

It was easy to set up but easier when you are computer literate. You are supposed to be able to buy the web plug-in using the Archos but I had to go to their website and buy it there instead. No big deal but a little confusing.

Player works great with Windows Media Player. I've never liked itunes anyways. Love all the features and love being able to use a stylis with it. Also, since we have AT&T's DSL service, my wife can use her Archos browser at the local McDonalds wifi for free while the kids play. How cool is that?

As the word gets out, this player will start making a dent in Apple's ipod touch. I'm going to sell my ipod video and get the Archos for myself.

i researched this item and couldnt wait to buy it. once i got it it was everything i that i hoped it would be. i love my pictures, videos, and music, so now that i can have all of them with me whenever i want im very happy. plus if im near a wireless hot spot i can surf the net!! what more could any one ask for in a media device? the ony reason why i dont give it five stars is because of all the extra plugins and accessories that come at an extra cost, but even that makes the archos more customizable.
overall ths is a great buy>:}

The 605 wifi flash with sd slot works great. Only problem can not get it to work with sd card.