Gain WiFi with the Archos 704 Portable Media Player

I've been really impressed with Archos' idea of putting WiFi connectivity in the 704. I've initially thought it's just another small, colorful and lightweight gadget that plays the same old music and videos. The Archos 704 is rather big considering that it measures 7.05 x 4.96 x 7.75 inches which is doesn't fit too well in my big palms. However, I never expected it to weigh only 1.38 pounds which is very good.

The Archos 704 WiFi portable media player also comes with some power-packed features. Having a massive storage space of 80 GB, I was able to store my entire library of audio files, documents and around forty more movies. The large size of the gadget had a pretty nice fallback since it also housed a 7-inch screen that can have a resolution of up to 800 x 480 pixels.

The recording features of this portable media player were also quite remarkable. It had line in recording and video recording. I was just kind of disappointed how it missed a built-in radio and voice recording. I was able to play videos for a little over three hours. On the other hand, the Archos 704 WiFi had a wide range of media support. It has music playback formats for MP3, WAV and WMA files, I was able to view BMP, JPEG and PNG photo files and MPEG4 and WMV video files.

Its highlight feature, the 802.11g WiFi connectivity was able to suffice my needs and curiosity of how it can effectively exist in media players. File and firmware downloads, Web browsing and the like were a breeze on the huge screen and I was able to get everything I wanted with the adequate battery life. Internet connectivity makes the Archos 704 very convenient and I readily upgraded and downloaded codecs from the website to match other media types.

There's minimal lag between video playbacks and images appear sharp and bright. You can basically skip within videos without having any problems. User interface is relatively easy. The menus make use of icons which are easy to navigate. The 7-inch touch screen is very responsive to my fingers or the stylus. I can also quickly connect the multimedia player to a computer and it links with Windows, Linus or Mac.