Archos 5 review

Television, it seems, is about to invade all aspects of our lives. It's taken over our living rooms and now it's moving everywhere else. Just like the Nokia N96, the latest media player from Archos allows access to free downloaded BBC iPlayer content, and it's a development that could change the way we consume media on the move.

Download a media player-friendly video file to your PC from the iPlayer website and you can take your TV programmes away with you. Disappointingly, you can't download directly to the Archos 5 as you can with the N96, but it isn't too much bother to download and transfer.

Video looks great on the Archos 5's fantastic 800 x 480, 4.8in glossy touchscreen, and it's easy to use, too. There's plenty of space for files, with a capacious 120GB hard disk built in.

It's a very good music player, too, with decent sound quality and a good selection of features, such as streaming from UPnP networked music sources and track transferral over the air.

File-format support is respectable: out of the box the Archos 5 supports SD MPEG4, WMV and MJPEG for video plus MP3, WMA, WMA Pro, WAV, OGG and FLAC for audio. But you have to pay extra if you want to play HD MPEG4, SD MPEG2 video or AAC audio - at this price we'd expect that to be included.

But it isn't just a TV, video and music playback device. Archos is marketing the 5 as an Internet Media Tablet, so it has Opera on board for browsing the web and a POP3/IMAP email client. You can also watch web TV over Wi-Fi and listen to internet radio. Plus there's a mind-boggling array of add-ons: you can add in-car GPS and a Freeview tuner, a helmet cam, an FM tuner and 3G capability, while a docking station turns it into a fully-fledged DVR.

This truly is the most fully featured personal media player we've ever come across and it isn't much more expensive than a 32GB iPod touch. Plus with phones such as the iPhone and Nokia N96 treading on the toes of traditional media players, it's hard to imagine too many people being able to justify spending £279 inc VAT on the less flexible Archos.

Author: Jonathan Bray