Full Review

This handy mobile devise is great for the gadget guy or girl who wants to travel with their own entertainment or photo album, or music collection, all in one device. Consider this your own personal VCR, complete with time and date settings to record directly off your television at the specified times you select. One fantastic idea is the "Resume" option. When interrupted, like most traveling people do, watching a game or movie, with the Archos you just go to the resume icon and pick up exactly where you left off, the next chance you have to watch your Archos. Its presently available with a 40GB or 100GB hard drive. A busy executive, international traveler, parent, military member, or camper will love the compact size and its ease of use. College or teenage students will love it to play video games on, especially since the thumb controls are placed similar to how current xbox game controllers are set up. Parents be forewarned this is a high theft item as it can easily be slid into a large pocket, backpack, and/or inside jacket pocket, so check with your homeowners insurance before you send this pricy little toy off with your child to school or college. It would be nice if this devise had a lock as laptop computers have, unfortunately there is no way to lock/secure this devise, and so if someone wants to carry your ARCHOS off, it is history. It is USB port 1.1 backwards compatible, but could take some technical work from a computer wiz to make it work (it depends on your computer). This devise will let one record and play audio files, MP3, WMA, WAV (including protected WMA files), DivX, MPEG-4, Protected WMV files, and video games. One can even transfer photos directly from their digital camera. One can not have a large 7" LCD screen with a 480X234 pixels, 262 000 color display and still have a devise that fits into their front hip pocket, so some size must be sacrificed, but it is easier to view and see all the movie details with the larger screen. If size is an issue, one can alwasy opt to purchase the ARCHOS AV4100 also available with 100GB hard drive (H3.1 X W4.9 X D1.0 11.3oz) but it only has a 3.8in LCD screen. When downloading videos from your computer, it's easiest to use Microsoft Media player and convert each file into a modified .AVI file. This will allow the ARCHOS AV700 to view and play the movie without issues. (It takes an extra 5 minutes per movie depending on the processor speed of your computer to perform this function) but it's better, as the ARCHOS software is a bit complicated to use. All software, with the exception of the ARCHOS firmware & updated USB drivers (which can be found at ARCHOS.com) is included within/on the ARCHOS hard drive.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS - PC: Windows ME, 2000, XP, Media Center, 800 MHz, 128MB RAM, USB2.0 MACINTOSH: G3 OS X (10.2.4) or higher, USB 2.0 port For PLAYFORSURE: PC with Windows XP SP 1 or higher, Windows Media Player 10 or higher, USB 2.0 port. INPUT: A/V (Composite), USB, S-Video OUTPUT:A/V (Composite), Headphone out (1/8" Mini) SCALABILITY: Free Operating System updates downloadable from ARCHOS website. Playback Autonomy Up to 30 hours for music (aprox. 55,000 songs w/100GB hard drive). Up to 4 hours for video (repeated testing with a new battery has proved two and 1/2 movies w/o the external speakers on, so I'd suggest one purchase the $15.00 car/cigarette charger or an extra battery) on the built-in LCD(aprox. 1,000,000 photos w/100GB hard drive) in either JPEG or BMP formats. The 100GB hard drive will hold a lot of movies, so far 142 and there's still plenty of room (over 4GB) left for MP3's, JPEG's/BMP's.