Screen
Archos have done a great job on the screen. Colors and dynamic range are impressive. Viewing angle is extremely wide in all directions and there is no milkiness that you often get with resistive touchscreen layers. Brightness is excellent. The only complaint is that the backlight doesn’t go low enough for dark-room reading.
Some of you might wonder why the device has a glossy screen. The answer is that it is part marketing and partly a sensible choice. Glossy screens look great indoors for sure but at least you can put a filter on top if you need to use it in sunlight. With a matt screen, there’s no option.
Keyboard.
The default keyboard is clean and usable and as mentioned above, works well in landscape mode. Portrait mode is also possible but the large size of the Archos and the smooth plastics means it can be quite unstable. Unfortunately there is no haptic motor in the Archos 5 so people that are used to this will definitely notice its absence. Sound-on-press is available. Use with external bluetooth keyboard is possible but we haven’t tested that. An RF and USB keyboard and mouse test was successful through. See below.
Having tested many devices with built-in keyboards (we have a Nokia N900, Omnia Pro, Nokia N810, Eking S515 here right now) we want to highlight the higher concentration rate required for even the best on-screen keyboard compared to hardware keyboards. Creating the occasional short message or one-line email response isn’t a problem but if you need to get into any sort of multi-line text input, you’ll probably want to move very quickly over to your PC. The Archos is focused as an ‘output’ device so we understand the reason why there’s no hardware keyboard on this device but we wanted to point this out for people that might be thinking of using the device as a netbook replacement.
User Interface
Readers that are familiar with Android will be at home here. Users that aren’t familiar with Android won’t have any problems navigating around either. The home screen is landscape oriented, touch driven and consists of three pan-able home screens (center, left and right) on which shortcuts and widgets can be placed. Shortcuts can be for applications, bookmarks or playlists and through third party applications, a wide range of widget applications can be installed. Weather, Facebook, clocks, monitoring applications and many many more. The top-bar is dedicated to Android contol and notification features. Notifications can be expanded by dragging down from the top to reveal more detail and links. From the right you can drag in the applications window which contains a complete list of installed applications.
Portrait mode operation home-screen operation is something that would add a lot of value and we’d like to see this in a future upgrade to avoid having to move the device around in the hands after using an application that works best in portrait mode. (Most applications are designed for portrait mode as they are written primarily for phones but nearly all will also auto-rotate into landscape mode if needed.)
Overall, the user interface is relatively intuituive (there are some issues as you get into the Archos Media application) and relatively smooth. Improvements could be made all round with responsiveness and smoothness but we have no hesitation in puting the UI into the top quartile. [Ref: Our history of testing comes via our Sister publication, UMPCPortal.com]
Included applications
Archos ship the device with a number of applications including their own PMP application which has it’s own application bar on the home page. From here you access the video, audio, streaming, gaming and other Archos-specific media features. The application takes control of the Archos screen. More about the Archos media features below.
Also included on the Archos 5 are:
- GPS navigation 5-day trial. More information here. Untested due to short duration of trial. [We are trying to get a new free trial but so far we haven’t had any luck.]
- Deezer. Audio streaming app for free hosted audio tracks. A search for Depeche Mode returned a ton of terrible cover and karaoke versions so we refuse to go further with that one. [Depeche Mode fan here!]
- Twidroid. A great twitter application
- Craigsphone. An app to get to Craiglist? Does this need to be re-installed on evey firmware upgrade? We guess someone paid to have it on the Archos 5.
- Dailymotion. Driect access to the Dailymotion video site.
- Droidln-lite. Direct access to Linked-In profiles.
- A DVB-T applications (for when the DVB-T free terrestrial TV adaptor is bought and connected.) Untested but we’re interested in this one.
- Ebuddy. A good multi-protocol instant message application. (No Skype support)
- Email client (Imap, pop) Fast and useful considering the Google Mail application is not available.
- Gallery.
- Global Time application. Does nothing except provide a spinning globe as far as we can see.
- High Paying Jobs. Another unnecessary app that reapears every time you upgrade firmware. Annoying. Bloatware.
- Moov. Device search utility.
- Android Music App. Basic but usable. (No genre search/listing, rating)
- Quickpedia. Quick and useful online access to Wikipedia articles.
- ThinkFreeMobile. Read-only access to many document formats including Google Docs online. Useful. Deserves a review in itself.
- Yellowbook. Another app that gets in the way most of the time. A search for Pizza in Bonn, Germany returned useless results from the U.S. Uninstalled. Bloatware in our opinion.
- Additional Android apps: Contacts (useless as it doesn’t sync due to missing Google software components), File manager (Archos app) sound recorder and the usual Android Settings application, extended with Archos-specific features.
Great review as always, Chippy. I’ve had my Archos 5 IT for a little over 3 weeks, and I’m really liking it a lot for web browsing (very fast), ebook reading, and video/music playing. It will also do in a pinch for email and other uses. The re-flowing text on webpages makes it really easy to read and navigate.
I agree with almost all of what you have to say about the device and, like you, I hope Archos focuses future updates on stability. The Android market would be nice (I haven’t done the hack yet), but it’s a pretty capable device as is when everything works as it should.
Note: I’m still running on firmware 1.3.07, because I’d heard 1.4.?? wasn’t as stable and that there were more problems with YouTube. Have you found that to be the case?
Thanks for all your good work and for the detailed review.
I’m waiting for 8GB version, hopefully around 200 EUR.
It should be a great home information device for internet access, reading and some video.
Of course I can do all that more or less on my HTC Advantage already, but it’s slow (especially web browsing), video is not particularly good and built in HD makes it not as rugged.
If my Nokia n800 ever died I would totally get the archos 5. Right now I am in the market for a 7″ device and I can’t seem to make up my mind.
:(
I can agree with Chippy that the Archos 5 is becoming a more usable device as Firmwares are released. Nice to hear that Archos will be releasing a update to Android 1.6 and hopefully include the Android Market App. I have the hacked Android Market on mine now and also Google Maps. Maybe with Android 1.6 we can get Google Navigation hacked like on the Motorola Droid. I have installed the Dolphin Browser that James at Jkontherun mention and works very great with the Archos. It has a lot of more features. The Volume becomes a page up or down using the Dolphin Browser. See the video I did of it here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fJ6mCbT7ek
HG,
I also installed the Dolphin browser after seeing your video on jkontherun. I thought the stock browser was pretty decent, but Dolphin is better. The volume as page up/down is a great feature, the tabs are easier to work with, and the gestures can come in handy as well. I wish I could get some themes installed but the market is the only way to get those it seems.
gmich, have you installed the hack to have the Android Market on your Archos 5? Yes I agree the Dolphin Browser is great and the more you use it you can find better ways of using it and have a great browsing experience on the A5. From what I have read, Archos should be releasing Android 1.6 around the 17th of this month. This is going to be great, but we will have to wait and see if will allow the full Android Market or will have to hack again. :)
Innovativepeople Interworld Commnet gives mobile application development, iphone application development, android application development services in India Android applications
You say screenshots aren’t possible with Android. Not so: there are least two ways to do this. The first involves installing the SDK and then taking snapshots via the emulator, and the second involves rooting the device (in which case there are on-device apps to take screenshots).
The SDK method is not working due to 32bit screen buffer (so I read.)
Hacking and rooting the device is not something I’d recommend for getting screenshots!
Great review Chippy. I know my sons will be very excited on Xmas day, as both of them will be opening one of these. :)
so i got a question. i know the archos 5 has bluetooth. but can you take out a sim card out of a android based phone (like a mytouch 3g phone). and put it in the archos 5 for internet connection without using a wifi?
Really good review.
I’ve owned the Archos 5 IMT for 6 months now and have had very few problems with it; unexpected reboots while using the Opera browser being the most annoying. For all intent and purposes, it’s a computer and they all require a reboot at some point. :-) I haven’t experienced any of the other problems other users have in the past, so I thought I would look to upgrade to take advantage of the new Android OS.
I managed to persuade my other half to purchase the 32GB for Christmas. Collected it yesterday. Just one problem, I’m not allowed near it until the 25th…
Hi I read that by the end of the year there will be a full 2,0 android so you can get all apps that you can with droid. Anyone know for sure?
i heard that too, but no worries you can get android market, gmail, google maps and all that by reinjecting them, not even worthy of being called a hack, it is so simple and yeah, i think it’s because all files are .apk or something… that would be cool though :)
Firmware Version 1.7.33 is now available (January 20th, 2010).
http://update.archos.com/7/archos5/changes_firmware_archos5.html
I’m finding that the Archos 5 crashes a lot, at least 10-20 times a day. Most of these crashes are just a restart of the Android GUI, and not a machine reboot. At first I just the thing was buggy. But after installing SysTray Monitor, I could see that system responsiveness would slow to a crawl as free memory fell below 20MB, and then Android would crash around 16 MB free. My impression is that the A5A has insufficient RAM to operate effectively. Consequently it requires continual vigilance, and the use of a tool like TasKiller, to manually kill off apps before all the free RAM bleeds away and another crash ensues.
Note that I have to do none of this with my HTC Magic 32A, which has 288 MB RAM. The Archos A5A however, has only 128 MB RAM. WTF were they thinking? This unit is nearly useless as a general computing device because of the need to be continually monitoring your free RAM.
Correction, the non-Android version of the A5 has only 128MB RAM. The A5 with Android has 256MB, but apparently only about 103 MB of this is available to the user for running apps. Lots of chit-chat on the ArchosFans forum about the need to be actively managing the free RAM.
you say in your Conclusions that the use of a bluetooth keyboard was untested. Well, I’ve tested it, and it works great! So far I’ve tested with a foldable iGo Stowaway (Blue Fn keys work, Green ones don’t), and a full-size older-model white Apple bluetooth keyboard (almost all keys work, though Arrow keys are swapped around).
Haha, Thanks for your sharing,it’s very useful :)
Love to have that for my birthday – Thanks for sharing
Nice product. Cant wait to buy one for me on my birthday.
First!
Is this the latest gadget? hmmm.. really very nice! But its hard to have one!
A fantastic looking product but I too will be waiting for 8gb device.
WOW Looking good ! Will definitely make it’s way onto a few christmas card lists I am sure !
when i bought a car radio, i picked the car radio that is built by philips because they are well built ,`-
when i bought a car radio, i picked the car radio that is built by philips because they are well built ,`-