For the past few months, I’ve had the chance to play with a really cool media tablet. It plays videos. It surfs the Web. It does e-mail. It displays photos. It plays Internet radio and MP3s.
No, it’s not THAT tablet (you know, the one from our favorite tech orchard).
It’s the ARCHOS 7 Internet Media Tablet.
Archos makes some really interesting devices, and they’ve been doing it for years. They made a portable digital video player before Apple released the video iPod. Unfortunately, though the products get good reviews, they’ve never gained much traction in the U.S. The Archos 7 probably isn’t going to change that track record, but it should.
The Archos is designed to work with Windows Media Player. And that’s probably one reason why it hasn’t gained traction. Fortunately, you can use doubleTwist, which I find makes it easier to manage and transfer media files to the device (but I’m getting ahead of myself).
As the name suggests, the Archos 7 has a 7 inch diagonal color LCD screen, which makes viewing videos a pleasure. The screen resolution is 800×600, so videos are nice and crisp.
The Opera web browser, working over built-in WiFi, allows you to go to an Internet site and download audio files directly to the unit’s internal hard drive. It’s easy to configure the internal WiFi software. Sadly, you can’t purchase tracks from the Amazon MP3 store on the device, but you can easily download podcasts, for example (though there’s no internal podcatcher software). The sound quality is good, though my audiophile husband says it’s not quite up to his standard.
Regarding that hard drive, you have two capacity choices: 160 and 320 GB. (I literally couldn’t believe it when I heard the low-end iPad would only give you 16 GB of storage).
For some unfathomable reason, Archos did not include H.264 support for the device, though its available as a $20 upgrade. Also available is a $200 add-on that lets you record TV as if it were a DVR.
If you already have a video file you want to play on the Archos 7, side-loading it from a computer over a USB cable (provided) is fairly straight-forward. Using doubleTwist, it’s pretty much a drag-and-drop process. It takes time, though. A 40 mb file takes about 15 minutes, plus any conversion time that doubleTwist may need to do. The Archos plays MP4, WMV and other formats. It says it will play FLASH, and this was a major selling point for me, but the FLASH execution is uneven. Some videos play while others do not.
These are some initial thoughts. I’ll add more next time. Until then, think about the Archos if you’re looking for a internet tablet that let’s you do more than Apple thinks you should do.
