The Archos 604 has an excellent base price with a decent choice of accessory options; sharp and vibrant display; can record audio and video with the optional kit; has a removable battery, a built-in speaker, and a built-in kickstand; nice tactile controls and well-designed interface; can view photos and listen to music simultaneously; compatible with subscription services; it’s durable and compact for its screen size; excellent photo viewer.
This is a stunning looking device, backed up by an excellent LCD that boasts a crisp, vibrant display for your movies and photos. Obviously a device of this nature is mainly intended for video playback, but Archos has left no stone unturned in its quest for the ultimate multimedia companion.
The MP3 player, for example, is one of the best we’ve seen (and heard). Aside from the fact that the large screen makes navigating and managing your music a breeze, the controls and menu structure are excellently conceived, with the Archos Arclibrary tool automatically sorting new music into ID3 tag categories for easy browsing.
The large 4.3” 16:9 TFT screen looks fantastic and far better than its native 480 x 272 pixels suggest. The backlight is good and strong and it has a surprisingly good angle of acceptance meaning you do not have to sit dead ahead of the screen. It’s even possible to set the unit up on a desk using the inbuilt kick stand, which helps keep the angle just right as long as you don’t want to use any of the base mounted connectors. The right-hand edge of the screen is taken up by the main control set which includes the menu key and 4 way selection keys plus the housing for the small inbuilt speaker. The upper edge houses the power button and the LCD / TV toggle switch while the left hand edge house the indicator lights for power / charge / HDD activity and TV / LCD use, plus a small microphone.
As mentioned the lower edge houses the main connectors for docking stations such as the Archos DVR dock and travel dock, plus the main USB connector. For our review we set up the unit in its simplest package, with the connector supplied for USB connection to a host PC. Normally this is where the tale of woe starts as we find formats that won’t play and how we fight with the supplied transcode software and it takes all day to get one movie to play in poor quality.
However the Archos 640 is different as it claimed to support Windows Media files natively up to main level profile at DVD quality. Great, so we put it straight to the test with a ripped copy of Oceans Eleven in WMV @ 1mbps 640 x 480. It pushed over the USB connection in just under 4 minutes (roughly an 850mb file) and was quickly picked up once we switched the Archos back from USB to playback. Then expecting the worst we hit play and the screen was filled within the opening scenes as Danny Ocean leaves prison, it may not sound impressive but most PMP’s fail this simple test, insisting that you jump through hoops before files will play. The AV 604 supports WMV, MPEG-4 Avi up to DVD quality, plus with some plugins it will also handle H.264 with ACC audio and MPEG-2 up to 10mbits @ML.