Archos 5 - Jump On The Pandy ?


It is a better screen than the 605/Pandora, but it is very buggy. Interface is nice though, and it has Opera with flash 9. You can buy DSP codecs too.
 
Pseudonym - i wasn't thinking of it to replace 'my' pandora - It was just the first new ARM device I've seen - which I found comforting.
 
  • The Archos 5 costs $450 in the US, which is $100 more than the Pandora. The Pandora was bordering on expensive, but this is expensive.
  • It doesn't have a real keyboard.
  • Screen is slightly bigger, but that means the unit is also slightly bigger. The Pandora is already near the edge of what's pocketable. I can't imagine this would fit, or survive in, any of my pockets.
  • Less RAM.
  • Archos has lots of storage, but that probably requires a lot more power and space than an SD card. :p
  • No Bluetooth. (Not a big deal for me.)
  • It does appear to have all the licensed codecs for any kind of media playback.
  • Has Flash 9 included. However, the Pandora will probably be getting Flash 10. No one knows for sure.
  • "Music playback time: up to 22 hours" for the Archos, compared with the max of 100 hours for the Pandora. And that's just the advertised time; no doubt real-world scenarios will cut off a few hours from that.
  • Can record video and audio via its station. This is something that would take some money and time to get working on the Pandora. (It would be doable, as far as I know, just not easy.)
  • You can probably order the Archos via credit card. :D
I'd still buy the Pandora. No way am I going to be locked out of my handheld with some proprietary application launcher. :)
 
Benjiro said:
You forgot screen size: 800x480 pixels, 4.8' TFT LCD, aka 0.5" larger screen.
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Oh, and don't forget the transflective part... But to make up for that, the pandora has gaming controls, dual sdhc slots, etc. the pandora is a pretty specific product, while this is for a more general audience. What's the price anyway? expensive.
 
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I saw it in a shop.

* Good screen (bigger than the pandora - which has a good screen too)
* Not bigger than a pandora i think.. there is no place for speakers, keyboard, etc.

It seemed a good multimedia player to me.

But it can't replace a pandora at all (games, linux, etc).
 
hells_dark said:
It seemed a good multimedia player to me.

But it can't replace a pandora at all (games, linux, etc).
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Right, it's aimed at a different market, and it's not going to be any good at all for gaming. That doesn't even touch the bits about being closed source and the added cost.

It might be a good player, but whether or not that's the case it's not capable of replacing a pandora for most pandora users. It just doesn't have the features to do so.
 
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i had the chance to play with a 605 demo unit at a store today. my impression from the screen:

* screen feels a tad smaller than i originally expected it to be (yes, i know how much 4.3" is, but still), but despite that
* definition is perfect, so everything, down to the smallest font, is readable. color reproduction is very nice, and the view angle effect - minimal.
* brightness is medium, which is not necessarily a drawback, as most current TFT technologies sacrifice gamut for brightness, which i sincerely hate.
* no noticeable ghosting.
* touch responsiveness was flawless, not once did it miss to register a touch, or misread one.

overall, a very nice screen for a pocket form-factor device.
 
You mean $350 US right? Really about the same as the Pandora, once you figure the money that most people lost (myself included) in the initial preorder.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?sk...d=1218034004685

With a 60gb hard drive no less. Come on now, nobody is attacking your precious Pandora, they were just mentioning another product with similar specs. No need to get defensive.

javaJake said:
  • The Archos 5 costs $450 in the US, which is $100 more than the Pandora. The Pandora was bordering on expensive, but this is expensive.
  • It doesn't have a real keyboard.
  • Screen is slightly bigger, but that means the unit is also slightly bigger. The Pandora is already near the edge of what's pocketable. I can't imagine this would fit, or survive in, any of my pockets.
  • Less RAM.
  • Archos has lots of storage, but that probably requires a lot more power and space than an SD card. :p
  • No Bluetooth. (Not a big deal for me.)
  • It does appear to have all the licensed codecs for any kind of media playback.
  • Has Flash 9 included. However, the Pandora will probably be getting Flash 10. No one knows for sure.
  • "Music playback time: up to 22 hours" for the Archos, compared with the max of 100 hours for the Pandora. And that's just the advertised time; no doubt real-world scenarios will cut off a few hours from that.
  • Can record video and audio via its station. This is something that would take some money and time to get working on the Pandora. (It would be doable, as far as I know, just not easy.)
  • You can probably order the Archos via credit card. :D
I'd still buy the Pandora. No way am I going to be locked out of my handheld with some proprietary application launcher. :)
Click to expand...
 
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The biggest flaw in all of Archos's products is how locked down they are. My 605 and the newer 5 both tick almost all the checkboxes of what I look for in a PMP, but the codec support is lacking unless you pay extra, and there's no way to flash a 3rd party firmware on it, even though the firmware is Linux-based. The second wouldn't be a problem if their official firmwares weren't so buggy and unresponsive, but the first bugs the hell out of me. The battery is also not user replaceable, which is another downside, and TV-out requires an additional piece of hardware, which is also buggy as hell. I like it more than I liked my iPod, which had a decent UI but was otherwise pretty shitty, but it's tough to recommend it. If Cowon would quit fucking around and release a PMP with a big hard drive and a high-res screen, I'd be all over it.
 
stuey said:
Saw one of these today - kind of a 'Closed source' Pandy -

A8 but only 128mb ;-)

http://www.archos.com/products/imt/archos_...ry=ru〈=en

Okay no built in game pad - comes with a qwerty remote.


How is it a "closed source Pandy"

Where are the gaming controls? Dpad? Analog sticks? The built-in keyboard?

I don't understand how everytime a new device comes out that has an LCD someone posts "Competition for Pandora" "Pandora had been beat" .

This is weird.
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a better question is "how" is this closed source?!? It's linux based, so there should be source available somewhere (whether it is atm or not is still questionable...). Atleast the kernel & GPL'd libs... I'd imagine that certain things (certain closed source drivers under special licenses) couldn't be released, but others HAVE to be...
 
Possibily, but it is the interest of somebody making the effort to produce programs/games for it is another question. Whereas with the Pandora, it is solely made for the intension of development in my opinion. :unsure:
 
Hooka said:
a better question is "how" is this closed source?!? It's linux based, so there should be source available somewhere (whether it is atm or not is still questionable...). Atleast the kernel & GPL'd libs... I'd imagine that certain things (certain closed source drivers under special licenses) couldn't be released, but others HAVE to be...
OSX is Linux based, but it's not an open source OS. Sure, Archos has to release their version of the kernel, but anything else (likely everything else) is at their discretion. Archos has a less-than-excellent history of supporting community development for their devices. In fact, they're pretty famous for charging extra for just about everything you want to add to their PMPs, including codecs.

A quick google search for "Archos homebrew" comes up with naught except a DCEMU forum post about somebody managing to crack the hardware locks on the series 5 players (also linux based) to load a custom firmware. I can find no information on whether the 6 series has similar locks, but I would think that if they didn't, that fact would be newsworthy enough to show up in relevant articles. It does not.
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Chip said:
Hooka said:
a better question is "how" is this closed source?!? It's linux based, so there should be source available somewhere (whether it is atm or not is still questionable...). Atleast the kernel & GPL'd libs... I'd imagine that certain things (certain closed source drivers under special licenses) couldn't be released, but others HAVE to be...
OSX is Linux based, but it's not an open source OS. Sure, Archos has to release their version of the kernel, but anything else (likely everything else) is at their discretion. Archos has a less-than-excellent history of supporting community development for their devices. In fact, they're pretty famous for charging extra for just about everything you want to add to their PMPs, including codecs.

A quick google search for "Archos homebrew" comes up with naught except a DCEMU forum post about somebody managing to crack the hardware locks on the series 5 players (also linux based) to load a custom firmware. I can find no information on whether the 6 series has similar locks, but I would think that if they didn't, that fact would be newsworthy enough to show up in relevant articles. It does not.

OS X is BSD based, and their license is much more permissive about what you do with their source than most. And yeah, if you do some digging, all of the open source stuff for the Archos gear has source available. The catch is their players will only run signed OS images and binaries, so there's no way to run a non-approved Linux version on their players. Even the Go Fighting Tabby hack was pretty useless in practice.
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