LinuxDevices is reporting that a new WiFi-enabled portable A/V player from Archos (604-Wifi) runs an embedded Linux OS and sports the Opera web browser. It is thought that this is the most advanced PMP in the market today, although Bluetooth A2DP/AVRCP support and FM radio are missing.
New Archos WiFi-Enabled PMP Runs Linux
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I’m curious about the boot-time on this thing. I’m not that impressed with for example Nokia’s internet tablet for this reason.
It runs on a real hard drive instead of flash and it only has the few libs installed, so I expect it to boot in less than 15 seconds. It is running Qt Embedded with a custom UI btw.
My zaurus C3000 has a real hard drive and still takes at least 1m30 to boot. Good news is suspend. 2 seconds. I normally never do a real boot.
Your Zaurus runs the full OS, while these PMPs only need the bare minimum. My Linux-based phones which are also using a custom UI on top of Qt Embedded usually boot between 15 and 30 seconds. I expect this PMP with hard drive to be equally fast to boot.
Someone should mention the zaurus costs around twice as much.
I’ve got an older model (AV700), and have not been impressed.
#1 – It sucks watching movies on such a small screen. I thought I could get used to it – no.
#2 – The thing is finicky about the movies it’ll play. If you don’t encode them with a certain set of settings, forget it.
#3 – Battery life just isn’t there. One or two movies tops.
#4 – Interface sucks. Nothing more to say really, it’s just a bad design, clunky.
I could go on, but since this article is about the newer version, I hope it’s much improved.
>It sucks watching movies on such a small screen.
This is the same for all PMPs. I am personally used to watching stuff on small screens, although the 604’s screen is pretty big compared to most PMPs in the market.
>Battery life just isn’t there. One or two movies tops.
They can easily pull out two 2-hour movies. And this is what the competition can do too. It’s impossible to offer better battery life with the current battery technology. Decoding movies naturally takes too much CPU, much more than decoding music. I guess you should revisit the idea in 20 years time.
Edited 2006-09-07 20:31
I realize the thing about the screen size is the same with all PMPs, certainly I’m not faulting the archos SPECIFICALLY for that, I’m faulting all small-screened video devices, archos included.
About the battery life, I’m telling you – I own an AV700, and I’m lucky to get two full length movies out of it. Maybe if I really ran the screen at a low brightness or something I could safely do 2×2 hour movies. Or, maybe if I used a really low compression scheme so it didn’t tax the processor as much.
Just because the device is “on par” with the competition, doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck.
It just means they *all* suck, which tells me I shouldn’t be purchasing such things until they stop sucking. 
You are right though, we probably won’t see anything good until a new energy storage medium crops up. Super caps, some of the new battery techs, etc. Hope we see a portable cold fusion device the size of a quarter soon, I’m tired of waiting on my 100″ 1080p portable projector that fits in my pocket.
>I’m tired of waiting on my 100″ 1080p portable projector that fits in my pocket.
I am afraid that this won’t be the future…
The future is geared towards video through Bluetooth to eye-wear that can simulate large widescreen TVs. The Bluetooth consortium has already created the video profile (called GAVDP) and the first mass-market device that supports it is the Sony Ericsson K800i cellphone. Now, we are waiting for PMPs that support the GAVDP profile *and* eyewear devices that also support it. The audio/video is sent through Bluetooth 2.0+EDR from the PMP to the eyewear device and when you wear it you feel that you are in front of a huge TV or cinema. Of course, it means that you can’t watch and drive, but you aren’t supposed to do that with PMPs either…
Edited 2006-09-07 20:58
That’s the equivilant, and it’s just as good for me. That is, when they figure out how to cram 1080p worth of pixels for a 100″ pseudo-display into lcds/whatever tech that fit in glasses.
I don’t think that 1080p will work with current Bluetooth speeds. But if they use something as efficient as h.264 then you could have as high resolutions as 480p wirelessly with Bluetooth 2.0+EDR (on both devices, receiver and sender).
My fear is not the actual speeds and devices to achieve this transfer rate, but the fact that GAVDP might not use an efficient algorithm in terms of bitrate as let’s say, as h.264 is. You see, the video is re-encoded to the GAVDP format right after it was decoded by the actual PMP (the “sender”). The key to success here is that the re-encoding must be done as efficiently as at least h.264 is, in order to fit good quality/picture-size on 100 KB/sec that Bluetooth 2.0+EDR usually maxes out at.
I personally could care less about the bluetooth. Get me a set of 1080p glasses that simulate a 100″ screen, put a wire on them, and run it to my little device, and I’ll be happy. You can wait for bluetooth 4.75 or something, I’ll take my wired glasses now.
(Fat chance, unfortunately.)
Good ideas though, and all of what you said I agree with. The tech just isn’t there yet.
Make a search on google about “video glasses”. There are about 5-6 such products right now. It’s a new technology, and atm they only support the iPod (in terms of input). They simulate 50″ screens, and they usually have either QVGA dual screens in them. Far from HDTV quality, but as we said, the tech is not there as of yet. I expect this idea to really take off in the next 2-3 years though. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple themselves offers such a product to accompany their iPods.
I thought linux was supposed to make these things cheaper!
I can get a Windows powered PDA with all the same features for less.
What a joke.
Man that looks sweet, wish my gp2x had 30gb hd and wireless, all things considered $480 is not a bad price at all
Check out the attachments, like the portable dvr:
http://www.archos.com/products/video_recording/camcorder.html?count…
why no ogg vorbis/theora support? you’d have thought that based on an open OS, it would be no extra pain to implement? i use an iAUDIO X5L 30Gb because it allows me to play back FLAC and OGG files and because i need to special OS or drivers no send/receive files to it.
Edited 2006-09-08 00:08
The A604 and the A604wifi both come with a LCD panel with 480×272 pixels. PAL and NTSC resolutions are supported by both devices when they’re connected to an external TV.
Nah, digital is the way to go! DAB is far, far better… Hundreds of stations… mind you do you get free to air digital radio in the States? Don’t you have subscription based Satelite radio or something like that?