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July 31, 2008

Archos 705 WiFi Portable Media Player

With a relatively large size and weight, the 705 is better suited for the road traveler rather than the average user, who might prefer a more compact solution such as the Archos 604 player.

However, users who enjoy watching videos on large screens will be pleased with the Archos 705 WiFi Portable Video Player with its 7-inch widescreen display. This unit came with a 80GB capacity, which allowed us to carry fifty full length movies or more than 15,000 songs.

Eliminating the need for buttons, the 705 has a touch screen interface for menu navigation. Using the touch screen was intuitive and reduced our need for the supplied stylus.

Watching videos on a 7-inch screen on the go certainly made the experience much more engaging. The videos we watched on the 705 were sharp and detailed. In our battery tests, we managed to catch a full movie lasting 2.5 hours which left the battery life indicator with a single bar remaining.

The 705 is capable of MPEG4, AVI, WMV and DIVX playback but for an additional cost, you can opt for a plug-in for H.264. Using Windows Media Player, transferring media files from the PC to the device can easily be done via drag and drop.

While the 705 offers an adequate amount of audio options such as equalization and bass boosting, the volume playback by the 705 was very soft in comparison to an audio player such as an iPod. Even using the speakers did not help much.

Beside music and video playback, the 705 allowed us to surf the Internet with a built-in Opera browser using Wi-Fi. During our testing, the device handled browsing well but the lack of a physical QWERTY keyboard proved to be the 705's weakness. The touch screen keyboard is quite troublesome to use and it can never replicate the ease of a traditional keypad.

[full review]

Posted by pajaro at July 31, 2008 10:14 AM