Archos 105 Music Player

June 2008: I bought an Archos 105 music player. I am quite satisfied with it. They don't make it clear in the documentation, but it does play WAV files. This is important for people that like good sound. It would be great if it would play FLAC, but it doesn't. Anyway, it is a good machine. Here are the highlights:

uses a standard mini USB cable
mounts as a standard USB mass storage device
plays files in alphabetic order, by directory
has better sound than my old Panasonic
firmware updates are easy and don't require a special program
everything works correctly in FreeBSD

I dislike the fact that it only plays WMV9 video. No free open-source program outputs WMV9. It is a proprietary format and is one of Microsoft's tools for fostering incompatibility to lock out fair competition. So the video feature is pretty much useless for me. If I cared about video, this would suck, but I don't care about video.

They could probably add a couple of things that would make the machine more useful. First, why not include support for reading text files? It would just be a few lines of code. Second, basic PDF support would be nice. It would be cool to have city transportation maps and train schedules on the media player. Anyway, I like the machine a lot. It does what it is supposed to do. This is high praise, and not to be taken for granted.

Update (July 2008): My Archos 105 has shitty battery life when playing MP3 files. It is much less than the 17 hours that they claim. I think that I am getting about 6 hours of battery life. Furthermore, the battery drains by itself when the Archos 105 is not being used. After a few days without use, the battery is mostly dead. I am disappointed by thing, having gotten used to getting more that 80 hours on an AA battery on my old Panasonic.