Rounder with a need for improvement

The Archos 5 is much - much more even. I have gained him in the first place because I was looking for a device with touch screen and large hard drive that I wanted to use to manage my 100GB Music mp3's. To put it straight to the point: The Archos 5 generally meets this requirement, however, has considerable need for improvement in detail.

The music browser is not designed in spite of hard drive space on the management of large amounts of data. The manual search for albums or tracks is complicated, a cover index, as is common in I-Tunes, Winamp or Windows Media Player 11, is missing entirely. Worst shortcoming is that the library is constantly updated itself. The falls at a few songs on hard, with a data volume of 100GB it sucks on the other hand already huge. If you start a playlist and wants to go while playing on the directory structure back to look around a different playlist, my Archos required every 50 seconds, during which he did not respond. This is done at each step, so that a search of the folders or playlists is virtually impossible. Just imagine how long the need, should be full of songs even 250GB. But you can work around this bug by using a trick: They turn on the search function to find a specific title. That works well. Unfortunately, it is this title then ask either hold the current playback, even add a playlist. You can only play it directly, which the current playback will cancel. Social listening to music, in which you can hear songs and this is already the next selects and presents on hold is NOT possible. This sucks huge!

Positives and negatives at a glance:

+ Good design, nice bright screen, good touch
+ Many features, though many still in beta version, waiting for a firmware update (currently 1.1.01)
+ Integration in WLAN and UPnP easily and quickly
+ Good sound, good video quality
+ Clear menu navigation
+ Numerous web radio and web TV stations selected
+ Good display quality of websites.

Music:
- Pitiful music library that is entirely unsuitable for managing large amounts of data. Who has a lot of music, is ill-advised with the device currently.
- Confusing layout of the media library without thumbnail overview.
- Slow response time in displaying the thumbnails in the playback, especially when skipping.
- Synchronization with Windows Media Player is slow and unreliable.
- UPnP can access Media Server (Windows Media Player 11), but is not itself a Media Server.
- To activate Shuffle quite complicated and poorly in random access (plays tracks from the same album very quick succession from).

Video:
- Video output is only available on the DVR Station.

Internet:
- Frequent crashes of Opera and WEB-TV.
- Severe flash support. Youtube videos are not only partially, other TV streams such as ZDF Mediathek.

The email client and contact management, I have not tried yet, so far as they are only available in a beta version.

Photo:
- Photo Manager is unfortunately unasked all cover thumbnails along with all other photos on the hard drive on, which prevails in the Photo Manager chaos.

System Settings:
- Too few settings

General:
- Rather heavy, therefore more stationary use at home. Then you should but might prefer to pick up the Archos 7.
- Short battery life
- No AC adapter, charging via USB only.
- Very sensitive to fingerprints
- Pixel error energize only 3 pixels by the warranty. Should you notice when you turn a pixel error, then immediately turn off, not up and return. Otherwise you have to live with the pixel errors, which always catches the eye in the display size.

Conclusion: The Archos 5 leaves a very streaky impression. One suspects what an awesome device that could have been, but feels once again as a guinea pig industry, which has cast a semi-finished product to market. If the greatest shortcomings firmware update be resolved, I would here like to report about it afterwards and awarded more than 3 stars.