Few Thoughts On Archos605

[Mark Watson]

I've made a few contributions to the Pandora discussion, notably my not being too happy with the form factor.

Having had a Tapwave Zodiac for a couple of years, I was hoping for something similar to that, which has a nice form factor, with an option of plugging in a USB keyboard, and being able to do a number of things - emulation, PDA, PDF and ebook reader, PMP, all just a bit better than the Zodiac. (Which actually does them all pretty well, considering its a few years old now, and a cautionary tale that having market leading functionality doesn't mean you're going to be a success in the market).

Being a bit impatient, I thought of bidding on a Sharp Zaurus on ebay, but decided that another nolonger supported piece of kit prolly not the best thing, although the form factor appeals to me. So I made a Boxing Day purchase of an Archos 605 wifi.

Good things about the Archos : solid construction, easy wifi connection to PC for streaming music and videos, 20mb hard disk for £150, nice big screen and very high quality

Poor things about the Archos : sometimes struggles to pickup a signal, PDF reader is very slow, not yet hacked (although appears to be happening), slow recharging

For me, what would be perfect (although the Archos prolly won't have the processing oomph) would be for it to handle PDF and word docs, and have an usb keyboard to plug in to do word processing etc, and emulator capacity.

Anyhow, the Pandora should be coming out sometime soon after my birthday, so I'll keep monitoring progress here and have it pencilled in as a possible birthday present.

 

[Ravnos]

I ordered a 160GB 605 at the beginning of December. Still waiting for it to come in, but I'm really only interested in it as a media player. The only reason I'd like to see it hacked is for better codec support (ogg, flac). There are a tonne of other devices that do all that other stuff better, and I'm betting the Pandora will be added to that list upon release as well.

 

[yaustar]

I am still trying to find a PMP that can handle MKVs and OGMs. AFAIK, Archos doesn't support them, I am hoping the Pandora will.

 

[Null]

I am still trying to find a PMP that can handle MKVs and OGMs.

The Cowon A3 does but it is rather pricey though, here's the list of video file formats it supports according to the American Cowon website.

AVI, WMV, ASF,MP4, MATROSKA(MKV), OGM, MPG/MPEG, VOB, DAT,MTV

http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/cowon...tech_specs.html

 

[Ravnos]

I am still trying to find a PMP that can handle MKVs and OGMs.

The Cowon A3 does but it is rather pricey though, here's the list of video file formats it supports according to the American Cowon website.

AVI, WMV, ASF,MP4, MATROSKA(MKV), OGM, MPG/MPEG, VOB, DAT,MTV

http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/cowon...tech_specs.html

I was considering a Cowon because of their awesome format support, but they're very expensive and they just don't have enough HD space. I figured that odds were good that I'd rarely go beyond the 605's supported codec list anyway, so for those corner cases I can bite the bullet and transcode.

 

[Spearhead]

Someone on the Archosfans forum found a way to gain access to the underlying Linux system of the 605, so additional things are only a question of time.

(read more at http://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?t=11144)

Don't know about codecs though, the DaVinci chipset the 605 uses doesn't have free devtools available for the multimedia chips as far as i know, only for the arm9 cpu.

But we'll see, some other dev(s) might come up with something there