Archos Widescreen PMP

An anonymous reader writes "Archos has just announced their newest portable audio/video player the AV 700 Mobile DVR. The new unit has a 480x234 pixel widecreen display, a hub to record from TV and DVD, and offers a 100GB drive. The sucker is heavy though weighing in at over a pound. Cost is $799 for the 100GB model and $599 for the 40GB. MP3 Newswire also has Part 1 of its MP3 players for summer. Most interesting are Creative's new Neeon and a high end unit from Bose."

Gmini 400 is still pretty sweet.

[falloutboy]

I recently starting commuting to Manhattan, and like many straphangers*, I want to listen to anything but the preachers and beggers on the subway. I was about to buy an iPod mini, but when I saw how much the Archos Gmini 400 does, I was blown away. I'm a photographer, so I have a bunch of high capacity compact flash cards lying around that I could actually use with the Gmini, which has a CF reader.

Archos Gmini review: http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20041021/ [tomshardware.com]

* Straphanger: slang for a subway rider. NYC subways used to have leather straps that riders could "hang" from in order to not fall when the car started moving. They've all been replaced by metal bars.

Re:A better Archos model is the PMA400

[FidelCatsro]

The question when thing start costing this much is if your better off with a laptop , the machine is smaller , lighter and has a larger hard-drive than most laptops in that that price range .
Though it lacks a keyboard , the screen is smaller and it cant directly play DVDs .
I can see the thing being highly hackable if it runs linux but i doubt it would ever have as many features as a laptop .

Re:Bad Size...

[Fringe]

Maybe, maybe not. I'm considering one for a different set of uses:

• Carry around a large HD with archives of my various systems
• Be able to play any of my large CD library tunes in my car, wife's car or rental car (using FM Modulator)
• As a PVR when travelling, for playback of recorded content in the hotel room (e.g. exercise videos, favorite shows)
• Long intercontinental flights, since the movies only change monthly and I often flight more often than that.

Sure, it's no iPod replacement, but do we really need another iPod replacement? The AV700 would be more useful for my needs, which don't include jogging or lots of normal walking with it.