The Archos 5 Internet Tablet has a large screen and a makes video viewing a pleasure but leaves a lot to be desired on other features on this gadget.

Sum and substance:

Thumbs up:

The Archos 5 Internet tablet has a large screen which gives you good experience in video quality, photo viewing and gaming. This device can be paired with cell phone for internet usage. Bluetooth pairing is fast.

Thumbs down:

There is IM but not voice chat which makes it incomplete. No voice chat support, locating places on GPS is slow, flash not supported for internet (further versions of Archos 5 Internet tablet support flash), awful music quality.

Inside the trunk:

4.8 inch screen, 720p HD video playback, built in GPS, Bluetooth, FM transmitter, Support for Micro SD memory cards, Built in speaker, microphone, USB, Headphones, Composite video, Lithium polymer battery, DVR station adapter.

Razzle Dazzle:

The Archos 5 Internet tablet has a big screen and doesn’t have any buttons on the surface. This product is the thinnest one Archos has ever produced. It is 3 inches tall, and a relatively svelte 0.4 inch thick so it comfortably sits in your jeans, but the hard drive models are twice as thicker.

The Whiz Kid speaks: The Archos 5 Internet tablet has lot of features packed in to one gadget. It has WI-FI, Video playback, Music, Internet applications like IM, and support for micro SD cards. All this makes a good product to buy. An addition of phone would have been icing on the cake.

Inside Dope:

The Archos 5 Internet tablet with Android is supposed to be a competitor to the iPod touch and Zune HD. But if seen quality wise, the manufacturers seem to have rushed in to making this product and there is plenty of room for improvement on this product. A lot seems to be desired in various departments on the Archos 5 Internet tablet.

The first thing that you notice about this gadget is the huge screen which stares at you. If you look at the screen and think this is a great video player then you won’t be disappointed. Archos 5 Internet tablet churns out video at resolutions at 720p and watching videos on such a big screen is pleasure. There is support almost all the formats like AVI, WMV, MPEG4, h.264, MKV, and Flash video content, many of which support resolutions up to HD-quality 720p.

FM transmitter is built in but there are quite a few problems with the reception. It is quite bad and Archos could have done better than this. But if you are making up your mind whether to buy iPod touch or Archos 5 Internet tablet, this one might give you the edge since iPod touch doesn’t have built in FM radio.

There is support for micro SD memory cards and we had plenty of issues with that too. Sometimes the Archos 5 Internet tablet refused to access the cards and showed them as corrupt, but then things went fine once the device was rebooted. So every time the Archos 5 Internet tablet refuses to show data on the card, you have no option but to reboot and try accessing it again.

Inclusion of WIFI gives way for internet access on Archos 5 Internet tablet. We had a hard time accessing websites that supported flash and the gadget didn’t load all the data on the site. It came to a abrupt halt after loading a few advertisements on the sites. However the Archos promised us that the further models will support flash 5 fully which gives us the idea is device is not finished product.

The applications included have support for IM talk, but the support for voice talk is not present which will disappoint the users. Users can also pair up this device on a celluar phone to access the internet. Thumbnail view is supported but it takes a long time no load the thumbnail view. Archos 5 Internet tablet has an edge over iPod touch here. iPod touch doesn’t support drag and drop transfer while the Archos 5 Internet tablet does.

Viewing photos is a pleasure when it comes to Archos 5 Internet tablet thanks to the huge screen. The supported formats are JPEG, BMP, GIF and PNG. But again there are drawbacks here, it is not easy to navigate and absence of “pinch” or resize options like the iPod touch has is something which the photographs enthusiast will balk at.

Games are supported for the user to play at his leisure while he is traveling or simply when he feels like it. Again games are a pleasure since the screen is huge. Games can be purchased from local website and you can play them, but the game quality is below par compared to iPod touch and Sony PSP. (Games for such large screen except iPod touch is not yet made, so maybe this will be made good in the future).

There is integrated GPS receiver on the Archos 5 Internet tablet but I takes a long time to locate places and has a cold boot time of 45 seconds.

Archos 5 Internet tablet also supports Android applications by Google but the support for these applications is limited. The cooler Android applications are not yet supported and only the basic ones can be used. This is perhaps the biggest plus point that this gadget has over iPod touch, since iPod touch doesn’t support Android applications.

Music player on Archos 5 Internet tablet is definitely not a competition to other MP3 players in the market. The sound quality is passable and is nothing compared to Cowon or Sony. A host of formats are supported like MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, OGG and WAV files but the audio quality will something that turns you off.

Nitty gritty:

The Archos 5 Internet tablet has more of negatives than positives. It was made simply to compete with the iPod touch. The features are same as iPod touch minus the phone but the feature quality is nowhere comparable. The features are all half served like, support for photos, but no support for pinching or resizing the photos. Apart from big screen, there is nothing about this device that you make you buy it.

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