Archos TV+ Wireless Media Streamer

Archos is set to release in September a product that might give the AppleTV a run for its money. Looking over what are the reported specs it seems that Archos has a great little product on their hands. One of the first things that caught our eye was the inclusion of a 500GB hard drive. Apple finally updated the AppleTV from 40GB to 120GB, but even 120GB small these days. Having 500GB allows the user to store more data internally and thus offers, in our opinion, a better experience.

Now the one thing that the AppleTV will always have in its favor is iTunes. So far there is nothing else like it on the market. Sure you can download media from other sources, but so far none of those sources also sell a media streamer. So Apple will always win when it comes to an all in one solution until someone else tries to take them on.

You can see by looking at the back of the unit that it can do one thing that the AppleTV can't and that is it can output to a standard definition television. One of the biggest complaints from us and from others was the decision by Apple to go HD only. We love that Archos can do both HD and SD. There are still a lot of people out there that haven't made the switch to HD so including SD output seems like a great idea to us.

On the HD front the TV+ will do 720p which is fine for most people. Sure it won't be able to do 1080p, but so far most HD that is broadcast is in 720 anyways, so for this iteration we think that is fine.

One thing that bothers us ( see our Sonos Hands on review ) are the terrible options most devices give you for entering text into the system. Some have you using a scroll wheel, others have you using up and down buttons to navigate a on-screen keyboard. All of these options leave a lot to be desired to say the least. Well we are happy to see that the TV+ ships with a full QWERTY keyboard as part of its remote. This is a huge plus for any text entry that you might encounter while using it.

OK, so all of this is great, but what are your options for hooking this up to your TV you ask. Well here ya go:

Video

HDMI
Component
Composite
S-Video

Audio

Digital Coax
Analong RCA

We haven 't been able to find full specs yet, but from looking at a few press releases it seems that this device is sure to delight. We say it all the time, but we can't seem to stop, we love the fact that more and more companies are stepping out of their comfortability zone and producing media streamers. Everyone realizes where the industry is going so the more devices on the market the better!

So basically we think this device could totally rock, considering that Archos also sells portable players that are rumored to sync with this device.
Once we get our hands on a unit sometime this fall we will be sure to report back!

July 16, 2007

Archos TV+ Wireless Media Streamer