At last fall’s Digital Hollywood I got a preview look at the Archos 705 WiFi and was knocked out by its look and capabilities. I just returned the device to the good folks at Archos after a three-week spin around the block. The 705 is just hitting retail stores. A few impressions …
What it is: the 705 WiFi is a new wireless portable media player, a step up from their 605. Chiefly, you’ll use it to watch video on the go — your own, your friends’, or TV shows recorded off your television set. You’ll also want to put your photos and music on this multifaceted player (it doesn’t record).
The 705’s display is flat-out gorgeous, thanks mostly to its size: a high-res 7-inch touch screen (800×480 pixels), almost twice the size of the iPhone’s 3.5-inch 480-by-320-pixel display. Of course, that means it can optimally display videos formatted at 800 pixels wide, but we’re still at the point where most Internet videos (and video recorded off the TV, unless you want realllly large files) are formatted at smaller dimensions, and so the pixelization becomes more noticeable.
It’s an Internet device, so you can surf the Web more comfortably than on your Net-enabled cell phone. But there’s no iPhone-type pinching or scrollng — the iPhone’s introduction has shaken up the mobile marketplace, and the 705 is Archos’s way of saying, what we can’t do with software we’ll make up wth eye candy, rich-media bedazzlement and a wifi connection for the always-on generation.
I gave France-based Archos kudos in my book Darknet for not bowing to Hollywood’s unreasonable restrictions on moving television shows from the small box to handheld devices, and here again Archos makes it much easier than the iPhone to transfer shows from the TV to your handheld.
Audio sounded richer and more satisfying on the 705 than most media players. Also of note: the 705 WiFi includes a QWERTY keypad remote control, built-in AV output and USB device hosting.
A few drawbacks
On the downside, this baby is heavy. I could see bringing it along on a car or plane ride, though not on excursions around town. It weighs 1.4 pounds vs. the iPhone’s comparatively featherweight 4.8 ounces.
Also, Archos remains strangely tonedeaf to Apple users (figuring, I suppose, that all Mac users will snap up an iPhone instead), but I didn’t expect such a subpar user experience when transferring videos from my MacBook Pro to the 705: Windows Media Player just didn’t do the job. (When I went to the Help menu and typed “sync,” it helpfully suggested: “try using fewer words.” Can you tell that I have a gripe against brain-dead help menus?)
On a few occasions, I received the error message, “Protected content (DRM) cannot be transferred,” even though I owned the right to everything I was trying to watch. And, it’s clear that we’re in a time of transition for Internet video, as perhaps 3 out of 10 of my MPEG-4 videos (which I encoded in the past year) wouldn’t play on the 705.
Snafus aside, the Archos 705 is a worthy entry in the media player sweepstakes, and videophiles should check out its supersize look and multimedia features.
Archos is selling both 80GB or 160GB models, which can store up to 200 movies, 95,000 songs and 1.6 million photos, they say. You can snag a 705 for $375 to $500 on Froogle.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
I need a good site that can walk me through this thing. Got it for my birtday but cannot get any movies loaded from my DVDs or from TV