Budget Touch Screen Media Player With Noticeable Flaws

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great audio quality, bright screen, large amount of audio format supported, affordable.

Cons: Clumsy touchscreen, difficult to navigate, no play list capability

The Bottom Line: 
With a wide variety of budget media players available, buyers should do their homework before purchasing this unit.

Author's Review
table.MsoNormalTable { line-height: 115%; font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; } Although Archos has managed to get some attention in the tablet PC market, many consumers are still unfamiliar with the line of MP3 players offered by the company.

Sporting a touch screen, the Archos 3 vision comes at a competitive price of under $100 for 8GB of storage, which should be an immediate benefit for anybody looking for a budget media player with full touch screen capabilities.

One thing that buyers will notice right away when using the Archos 3 vision will be the unresponsive touch screen.  Not only is the touch screen unresponsive, but Archos made operating the media play even more difficult by placing the volume and navigation tools right at the side and bottom of the screen, easily the most temperamental and unresponsive areas of the touch screen.

Once users get around to playing some audio files on the unit they will notice the high quality audio produced by the unit.  Not only is the audio great for a budget media player, the Archos 3 vision supports a wide variety of audio formats, making it easier than ever to synchronize your audio, however, once the media is on the player it becomes difficult and irritating to navigate with no support for audio playlists.  In addition to the lack of playlist support, the Archos does not tag FLAC audio files properly placing all files under that media format into one folder labelled "<UNKNOWN>", making it the audio performance offered by the FLAC format difficult to use.
Overall, buyers should beware when purchasing this unit, as they might disappointed by the non-user-friendly interface of the device, combined with the clumsy touch screen.