The latest Archos 5 is probably the most significant advancement for Archos to date. The French chaps have scrapped a great deal of what we criticised about past Archos devices -- though the Archos 605 WiFi was still good enough to win one of our Editors' Choice awards in 2007.
So it's safe to say we were excited about this new model. It's available in 60GB, 120GB and 250GB versions, with prices starting at around £250.
Design
While gadget design doesn't usually feature above surrendering and cooking gastropods on a list of things the French are good at, this really is the most beautiful Archos player to date. Gone are those clunky front-mounted buttons to control an unattractive interface, and in their place is a fully finger-controlled touchscreen. At 122mm (4.8 inches) it's also much larger than the iPhone or the previous Archos 605 WiFi.
It's also sharper, and the 800x480-pixel resolution is made even better by terrific pixel density, making this one of the finest screens we've ever seen on a portable video player of this size, second only to the Cowon A3.
Some built-in speakers sit on the right-hand side, and an integrated kickstand helps make this an ideal hands-free movie player. This is handy, so to speak, because the Archos 5 is a pretty damn chunky player; it's thick and it's heavy. But it's also solid, and feels amazing. Just don't expect as lightweight a movie experience as you'll get on an iPod touch.
Features
The Archos 5 runs on a customised Linux build with a 600MHz ARM CPU, making it a capable machine for its size. Out of the box it'll handle MPEG-4 SP, WMV, DivX, Xvid and Flash 9 FLV files up to DVD resolution. And it supports the BBC's portable iPlayer downloads, multiple audio streams and soft-subtitles, providing they're in the .SRT format.
However, Archos has also done its abysmal you-need-to-pay-separately-for-extra-codecs thing again, meaning you need to cough up just over £12 to get support for 720p HD WMV and MPEG-4, another £12 for MPEG-2 and DVD VOB files, and another £12 for H.264 video and AAC audio. The Cowon A3 does all of this right out of the box for no extra charge.
Though audio support is a little above average, with supported files including MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG and both protected and unprotected WMA, AAC support costs an additional £12, as mentioned. Unsupported formats -- most of which only advanced users will appreciate -- include AIFF, Apple Lossless, Monkey's Audio, AU, MusePack, WavPack and WMA Lossless. Fans of live music albums won't appreciate the lack of gapless playback, either.
Of course the other main feature of the system is its Internet capabilities. Opera's Web browser comes pre-installed and gives you access to the full Web, with the advantage over the iPhone in that it supports Adobe Flash content. There's also an email app for accessing POP and IMAP mail accounts, and access to various online video services such as Daily Motion.
This is all accessible via the Archos 5's built-in 802.11b/g Wi-Fi (a 3G version will be available soon too), and your music and video files on your networked PC are streamable this way also. Games are supported, but must be purchased separately (sensing a theme here?) though SWF Flash games are compatible. We saved a bunch off the Web -- including YetiSports -- and found some of them quite playable.
Performance
If rubbish Flash games don't excite you as much as video, you're in luck. The amazing screen on the Archos 5 makes this device one of the most impressive portable video players we've seen. Its superb colour depth and practically unrivalled picture quality, combined with the more-than-capable CPU, helps high-quality video look truly stunning.
DVD-quality MPEG-2 and well-encoded DivX movies looked amazing, and audio quality through decent headphones was easily in our good books. The hearing-impaired will appreciate the support for subtitling, too, and once again that crisp screen comes into its own by making even small fonts readable.
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User reviews2
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red5 27 October 2008
Good: Screen size, Speed of the browser,
Bad: Software bugs, Poor paint finish, still not 100% flash
Comment: I would personaly stay clear of this device untill such a time as all the bugs are fixed, and trust me there are plenty. Paint comes off with very little use leaving the units looking awfull and as normal the support from Archos is pretty dire. Video looks great on this device and I think this is still its strongest point but you may need to pay extra for plugins for some video formats. Do not buy this device on the strength of promised accessories or features that have not been implemented already as this company has a history of not following througth on this sort of thing ( the FM remote never arrived for the 605 for example). All in all its a nice device but it is let down by the poor paint finish and numerous bugs that havent been fixed yet.
Charbax 25 October 2008
Good: Screen, processor, storage, HSDPA, WiFi, codecs support, HDMI output, FM remote control, DVB-T tuner, Electronic program guide, web video streaming flash/divx, browser speed
Bad: Version with built-in HSDPA is even better always connected to the Internet, Android and Adobe Air applications support would be nice, looking forward to USB keyboard and mouse support, waiting to hear if H264 720p will be supported with the upcoming HD Plugin, VOIP using SIP and Skype would be awesome
Comment: This review I think is much better then Donald Bell's review at cnet.com I think. But I still think it has a few things that I would not agree with or that are just plain wrong:
"the system refuses to play any DivX HD, Xvid HD or H.264 HD, or any MKV files"
- The HD Plugin is not yet released. It will probably support DivX and XviD HD 720p just fine. We are still waiting for info from Archos if they can support H264 720p or not. Which would make sense for MKV. Archos has said they are trying to add support for the MKV container in an upcoming firmware update.
"once you get accustomed to pressing quite hard on the touchscreen"
- It's not like touchscreens were invented with the iPhone you know. The Archos touchscreen is not any worse then any other touchscreens that aren't the iphones capacitative thing for multitouch. But the advantage here really is that the Archos screen is twice as large as the iphone screen with nearly three times more pixels.
"in exactly half of our tests over Wi-Fi, the Archos 5 loaded large Web pages faster than the iPhone. But scrolling, zooming and navigating pages isn't as smooth or enjoyable."
- Thing is with twice as large and three times higher resolution then the iphone, you don't need to scroll nor zoom as much as you would on the iphone. Do you need zoom on your laptop screen? No, so the Archos is the same, with 800 pixels resolution wide, and dynamic auto zooming technology from Opera, the pages are displayed like if you were using a 1000 pixel screen, so you don't need to zoom. And the fact that pages load twice as fast to five times faster then the iphone compensates for it currently not using momentum scrolling, though which Archos may add in a firmware update.
"but trying to watch BBC iPlayer Flash videos was almost impossible"
- The BBC has announced that they are launching a special version of the iPlayer that is compatible with the Archos 5, Archos 605 using playsforsure.
"The email app seemed to work okay for us, but it only offers IMAP and POP support, and only plain text emails."
- It does support HTML email, you just click on "Open HTML version" button in the email client. They could integrate full HTML inside of the main mail client window though. You can use the Browser which has full AJAX support (unlike the iphone) so you get the full real AJAX version of Gmail in the browser loading pretty fast and instantly if you want.
"one of the finest screens we've ever seen on a portable video player of this size, second only to the Cowon A3."
- Archos 5 has a 35% larger screen then the Cowon A3. So it's not the same size.
"Archos has also done its abysmal you-need-to-pay-separately-for-extra-codecs thing again, meaning you need to cough up just over £12 to get support for 720p HD WMV and MPEG-4, another £12 for MPEG-2 and DVD VOB files, and another £12 for H.264 video and AAC audio. The Cowon A3 does all of this right out of the box for no extra charge."
- Archos provides a package for all of HD codecs, Mpeg2, AC3, H264 and AAC for a 3 for the price of 2 £24 package. Most people don't need all those extra codecs, for most people DivX, WMV, Flash 9, Mp3, WAV, Ogg, Flac is enough. In fact 95% of the videos people download or stream from the Internet are DivX or Flash.
- Cowon has an MSRP $399, so how can you say Cowon offers the extra codecs at no extra charge? Cowon A3 is clearly more expensive, the reason being that you have to pay for all these codecs even if you need them.
Anyways, your review is much better then Donald Bell's at Cnet.com US, he is obviously even more of an Apple fanboy.
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