nArchos

I had planned to entertain myself on my trip to Detroit with an Archos Media Player which I bought on the company’s dime to give to one of the guys up North to demo. (It was one of the first devices with our latest chips in it). Unfortunately the player turned out to be an unadulterated piece of junk. I guess I have come to expect every piece of multi-media equipment to like an iPod in its simplicity and ease-of-use. The Archos was none of these. I turned on and tried to browse the web. It immediately asked me to register itself on the web in order for me to download the web browser software!!! Worse than that it required that I type in its serial number which was at least 12 digits long, underneath it and printed in a point size that would challenge anyone without bifocals. After I had finally successfully registered it I tried to put the contents of a DVD onto it but found I had to spend another $25 to unlock the DVD copying software. Large faceless corporations complain about"media piracy"- well this we certainly a shining example. By now I was getting annoyed and having coughed up the $25 for the unlock code I tried to copy the DVD to the device and the copy failed. “This may happen if the DVD is copy protected” the newly unlocked manual proclaimed. So I’d spent $25 to unlock software that was useless. I wondered if the problem lay in the Firmware, so decided to upgrade it. After 30 minutes of fiddling (which I could ill afford the night before a trip), I did indeed manage to upgrade the Firmware of the thing, whereupon it refused to connect to the PC ever again- giving a “USB Device Failed” message. I gave up and went to bed.