Pros: The pros come out as: 1) Gargantuan hard drive. You can store hundreds of hours of 320kbps or .flac music files and still have room left over for dozens of movies and multiple television series entire seasonal runs. 2) The 7" screen is large enough to view quite comfortably on an airplane tray table. The difference between this screen size and an iPhone is remarkable. 3) The breadth of file format compatability is wonderful. MP3, MPG, FLAC, MOV, MP4, AVI, SWF, FLV, WMV, DIVX, it's amazingly complete. The format limitations of the iPhone and other media players are what kept me from choosing those. 4) The wifi connectivity is a treat for streaming media from the home network when 320 GB just isn't enough or you don't feel like transferring every last file. The pre-programmed web radio stations offer plenty of interest although the web TV stations are mainly just a curiosity.

Cons: The cons: 1) The hard drive isn't nearly as lightning quick as flash memory or even the hard drive you have on your computer. The player regularly becomes unresponsive for up to 30 seconds when changing playback of large files or those in different directories. Music still plays, but buttons don't react. Shorter pauses occur during local storage browsing. 2) The only external controls are for power and volume. You can't control playback without looking at the screen which creates difficulty when driving. You can't even swipe your finger left or right to change audio tracks, -a technique supported during photo views. 3) Battery life is only about 4+ hours when using the videoscreen. That's not long enough to use on a flight from LA to DC. At least audio use extends the life to 12 hours. Long road trips will make you want a car charger. 4) The computer/internet browsing is functional, but less appealing than a computer. If you want that experience you're better off with a ne

Overall Review: The ability to tote around 320GB of audio, video, flash files, photos, and text documents in huge format varieties in a small wifi & web capable almost-tablet PC experience is seriously impressive. For now that's more than enough to offset the cons I listed. The weaknesses serve mainly to point out what to look for in future versions of the product. The best way to use this is to load it up with numerous audio playlists and then just let it run for hours on end with the power plug in. It's not fast enough to easily skip past tracks you don't want to watch/listen to, but if you just leave it running you'll be very happy. I have the mini dock but the only practical use I've had for it is a secondary set of power and USB cables so I don't have to carry them around from work and home. Plugging in USB thumb drives is nice, but my 16GB drives aren't compatible while the 4GB ones are. Camera offloads are fantastic. My choices before buying was this or a netbook. I'm very happy.

Pros: - MASSIVE HDD - Nice, Bright TFT screen for movie watching - Windows Media Player compatibility (not a fan of apple) - Ability to add media from several different sources instead of pairing with 1 library like the iPod

Cons: - Software is TERRIBLE. very slow and totally unintuitive - No "Album Artist" categorization - when a song is playing and you try to play another song, it doesn't play it immediately but adds it as next in the queue which is fine but then when you press the back button it goes back to the artist that's playing not the artist you queued which can get annoying when the song playing is by Aerosmith and you had scrolled all the way down to Zapp to queue it up and have to scroll all the way back down if you were browsing the library. - it takes a lifetime for the battery to charge (8 hrs.) - you can improve this to 3 hrs but have to buy a dock! - Nonstandard proprietary Archos connector for sync/charging i'm sure there are tons more as i seem to figure out something new everyday!!

Overall Review: The primary reason i went for this instead of the more popular portable media players is the size. I have well over 200GB of just music and I really, really enjoy not having to burn CDs and always have the song I want to hear with me. That property makes up for a lot of the shortcomings of this device for me. That being said, if you don't care too much for HDD space then DO NOT get this device. The software is slow as molasses and the organization of media is horrendous. On my WMP library, I organize by album artist because it is the fastest and you CANNOT do this on the 7. it's just by "artist" and this includes contributing artists separated by "/" which is ridiculous because you will have songs from the same album under 10 different artists. Also, I noticed when syncing via WMP, a lot of the music doesn't appear under the "Artist" heading. You have to go into "hard drive" mode and they are there but then they are file names instead of song names. Step it up Archos!

Pros: Sleek, sexy, advanced... on the surface. See "Cons" section for what's beneath the surface!

Cons: For starters, this unit does not play all codecs out of the box. Sure, it *supports* them, but those are "premium features", meaning you have to go to their web site and shell out all sorts of money on top of the $350 you just spent to get "unlock codes". What kind of shell game is that? Another frustrating problem is the interface. It is absolutely *cluttered* with all sorts of unwanted features that you cannot turn on or off, most of which are--again--premium features. So, you essentially have an advertisement-cluttered interface. See "Other thoughts" for the worst con of all!

Overall Review: Finally--and this is the most inexcusable of all--their customer support is *abysmal*. I cannot stress that enough. If you email them, it will take them the better part of a week to respond--if they *do* bother to respond at all (my success rate with getting responses from them is below 50%). If you decide to call them instead, be prepared to sit on the phone for at least a half hour between queue times, inept representatives, being put on hold or transferred... and, speaking of transferred, you may ask for a supervisor at your own risk. What do I mean? I mean that they get upset at you if you ask too many questions or even ask for a supervisor and then they actually hang up on you! How do I know so much about their terrible support process? Because my unit broke within the first year of using it (and I don't use it heavily). The hard drive just died one day and, believe it or not, over a month later now, it's still not fixed (I even have a pending BBB case open right now!).