Comments on: Archos 3 Vision review

By: trow

trow — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:41:36 +0000

It’s cheap and that’s shows. The touch screen sometimes fails to respond. The headphones are really low quality – mine have fallen apart within a month. Save your money and try something else.

By: Ben Sillis

Ben Sillis — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:31:44 +0000

@Del – 1.5 hours is certainly irregular, so I hope you get the refund or replacement you’re looking for. But yes, Archos’s software suffers from some very foolish UI points. I have to say though, its handling of video goes a long way towards amending some of them, it’s quite excellent at that. Here’s to the next one running Android eh?

By: Del

Del — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:37:00 +0000

This player could have been so good – unfortunately, after 2 weeks of ownership, I’ve just sent mine back for a refund! The reason for this was that the battery life failed to extend beyond 1.5 hours – I realise that this could well be a one-off fault with my player (although more likely to be due to the screen jumping into life when touched, even with the lock on), but, truth be told, I was pretty relieved that it gave me a legitimate excuse to get my money back. The other problems just became too irritating, and overshadowed what is a beautiful piece of hardware. The problems I found are as follows: As mentioned, the locking device does not disable the touch-screen, so when in one’s pocket it will continually activate unnecessarily, thus draining the battery. There is no facility to make your own playlists. As with most mp3 players (with the possible exception of Sony), the supplied earphones are nothing short of atrocious; empty baked bean tins would produce a better sound… The player doesn’t recognise audio smart-tags, opting instead to play tracks in alphabetical order. Album tracks therefore have to be renamed to add track numbers to the title – a pretty onerous task if you have a large mp3 collection! Selecting “Artist” in the menu will show all of the tracks by that artist, not the album those tracks are from. The only way to play an album as the artist intended is to search for your choice from the “Album” menu, a very laborious process if you have a lot of albums loaded onto the device – particularly if you have more than one album entitled “Greatest Hits”!! Which brings me to the method of navigating the device; Archos have developed a software version of Apple’s thumb-wheel, which appears on the lower right hand corner of the touch-screen. Unfortunately, this is truly horrific to use and results in a massive amount of errors. I really cannot articulate just how pants this system is!! I’m sure that most these problems could eventually be cured with a firmware update. I did email Archos and asked if this would be the case, but, having received no reply, I was just so relieved to get shot of it. Shame really, it could have been brilliant.

By: Ben Sillis

Ben Sillis — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:00:07 +0000

Absolutely. It’s a bargain if you can look past the ugly UI (and it is hideous, if perfectly practical) and genuinely fantastic for video.

By: Charbax

Charbax — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:48:02 +0000

Yes, consider that the most important thing about it is the price. The ipod touch 8GB costs £149, and consider that Archos’s £89 is only a manufacturers suggested retail price. Places like Amazon.com will quickly cut 20% more on that so selling it as low as £70, thus it’s for sure half the price of the ipod touch.