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<title>Kevin Boone: They don't make 'em like that any more: Archos 605 media player/recorder</title>
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<h1>They don't make 'em like that any more: Archos 605 media player/recorder</h1>
<p>
<img class="article-top-image" src="img/archos605.jpg"
alt="photo of Archos 605"/>
French company Archos was almost unknown outside France and,
frankly, scarcely better known within it. Yet in 2002 this
obscure company released the first portable
media player. Now that almost any phone can play audio and video, it's easy
to lose sight of how revolutionary this was.
It's also easy
to forget that, at that time, we had almost no legal way to obtain video
or audio files, except by ripping DVDs or CDs, or recording television and radio broadcasts.
On-demand streaming was
theoretically possible even then, but almost nobody had a fast enough
connection to the
Internet to use it. This was
the environment in which early portable media devices from Archos,
Creative, iRiver and Apple came to the market.
</p>
<p>
The <i>605 WiFi</i>, released in 2007, was probably the best-known
of the Archos
range and, in my view, the pinnacle. The same product family had the
<i>405</i> (smaller) and <i>705</i> (bigger) -- identical in
all respects to the 605 except capacity
and size. Although I'm mostly writing about the 605 here,
much of what I say applies to other devices in the same family.
I owned all of them and, in fact, still do. There's little that these
devices can do now that a modern cellphone or tablet can't -- but they
still have the edge in a few areas. In 2007, they were unrivalled.
</p>
<p>
The Archos company continued
to release innovative products for a few more years, but
nothing topped the 605. The
Archos brand still exists, but its connection to the pioneering small
company of the 2000s is unclear to me. Archos had the misfortune
to be in the same market as Apple and, later, Google; no small company
can stand comfortably between these two behemoths.
Throughout its early life,
Archos' products were technically superior to Apple's, in every way that
technical superiority could be measured. In the end, though,
Apple's brutal marketing knocked Archos to its knees,
and Google delivered the knock-out punch.
</p>
<p align="center">
<img src="img/archos605.jpg" width="440px"/>
</p>
<p>
The 605 had a stand-out feature that none of its rivals offered. Not
only could it play video, it could also record. With an
optional (expensive) extra, the 'DVR station' dock, we could integrate the
605 into a television or A/V set-up.
Using the DVR stations, not only could the 605 record
video, it could switch on a television or A/V receiver, and select the
appropriate channel to record. For a while, Archos released
TV channel timetables,
which users could download to the device to select which
programs to record. Then, because the 605 was portable, you could
take it out of the DVR dock and watch wherever you wanted.
So far as I know, no other manufacturer had a product like this,
before or since.
</p>
<p align="center">
<img src="img/archos605_dvr.jpg" width="440px"/>
</p>
<p>
The DVR station was a serious piece of equipment, with inputs and
outputs for just about every audio/video connection that existed at
the time. Whether a non-specialist could have set it up, I have
my doubts -- but Archos always catered to the geeks. While Apple
dumbed down its portable players to suit a non-technical market,
Archos focused on functionality and quality, even when that made
their products quirky to use.
</p>
<p>
The 605's recording capabilities weren't limited to the DVR
station: Archos sold a bunch of other nerdy video accessories. My favourite
was the little bullet-style 'helmet camera'. I guess the idea was that you'd
strap this to your bicycle or motorcycle helmet, and record your
heroic activities. I used the helmet camera to video family holidays,
and it worked fine -- and this was before direct-to-disk recording really
existed in the consumer electronics marketplace. Again, it's
easy to underestimate how far ahead of its time this capability was.
</p>
<p>
Another interesting accessory was the GPS add-on. With this, you could
use your 605 as a sat-nav. Although interesting, I don't think this
feature was implemented very well, and I never used it seriously.
There was an external battery add-on that doubled as a desk stand,
and included a USB port for connecting an external hard drive.
</p>
<p>
Many years before Netflix was streaming video, Archos had an on-line
video store. Unfortunately, download speeds were so slow at that time,
and the content range so limited, I don't think this was
a commercial success. Owners of Archos devices filled them with
their own CD/DVD rips -- and probably with bootleg movies as well
-- of which, more later.
</p>
<p>
Archos sold the 605 with a range of storage options -- 2-4 Gb of
solid-state storage, or magnetic disk drives from 20 to 160Gb. Again,
we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that 160Gb was a colossal amount
of storage for a portable device in 2007. It was close to the maximum
storage that that a single drive could provide in those days.
</p>
<p>
Irritatingly, though, the device firmware was keyed to a specific
model of drive, made specifically for Archos. So, not
only was it impossible to replace the drive with a larger one,
you couldn't even replace it with one of the same capacity and brand.
If a hard drive failed -- and this was inevitable in a portable
device -- only Archos could supply a functional replacement.
</p>
<p>
The 605 had a 5-inch screen with 800x480 pixel resolution. Again,
not impressive by modern standards, but about the same resolution as a
DVD movie, which was state-of-the-art at the time.
The screen was touch-sensitive, but it was rarely necessary
to soil it with fingerprints -- almost all features were accessible
using a row of clicky hardware buttons. These were a joy to use,
once you'd mastered the rather odd layout.
</p>
<p>
The 605 had a conventional 3.5-inch headphone jack, as everything
did at the time. There was no support for Bluetooth headphones, because
these were not widely available in 2007. Yes, it's hard to believe,
but there was a time before Bluetooth headphones. If you had the
DVR dock, you could connect the 605 to a proper hi-fi amplifier,
for headphones or speakers.
</p>
<p>
The 605 supported WiFi, and Archos provided
an implementation of the Opera web browser.
Oddly, this was sold as an optional application.
Other than streaming video from another computer on the same
WiFi network -- which was possible,
but rarely useful -- it's not clear what use the WiFi feature would
have been without a Web browser. And the browser itself was of little
use without an external keyboard and, of course, one was available
in the geeky accessory range. There was an on-screen keyboard, but
touch-screen technology at the time was not sensitive enough
for this to be anything but extremely irritating.
</p>
<p>
The 605 supported a large range of audio file formats, and a comparatively
small range of video file formats. If you were ripping your own DVDs,
this lack of format support was not a problem, because you'd have to
convert the DVD as you ripped it anyway. If you were recording from
a broadcast source, the format was largely irrelevant, as
the 605 would naturally record in a format it could play.
</p>
<p>
The narrow range of video formats was mostly an irritation to people who
wanted to download bootleg movies. There were, and still are, hundreds of
video formats in use by video pirates. In 2007 it would take a day -- perhaps
a week --
to download a bootleg movie from a pirate site; converting
it to an Archos-compatible format would only(!) take an hour or so on a decent
desktop PC. Still, the Archos web forum was always swamped with complaints
about how few video file formats the Archos devices supported. To be
fair, there were legitimate reasons to ask for newer video formats to be
supported -- it wasn't only piracy. Still, Archos
lost sales because its video support wasn't pirate-friendly. I'm not
sure what I find more dispiriting:
the fact that owners of
portable video players tend to have no respect for intellectual property,
or that they're too lazy to learn how to use Handbrake.
</p>
<p>
The Archos 605 ran an embedded Linux operating system. This wasn't
entirely an innovation -- the Archos PMA400 ('personal media assistant'), released in 2005,
was also Linux-based. The use of Linux in the PMA wasn't
really an innovation, either
-- the PMA was internally similar
to the Sharp Zaurus SL-5000, from
about 2002. In fact, the PMA could run some of the same software as the
Zaurus. Still, the use of Linux in a media player was a new idea back
in 2005 -- while Android has subsequently made embedded Linux
unremarkable in consumer devices,
Android 1.0 was not released until 2007.
</p>
<p>
Unlike the PMA400, the 605 never really exposed its Linux internals
to the user. Although various 'plug-ins' were available from Archos,
the 605 was clearly not intended to be a programmable device.
Of course, within weeks of release, the 605 had been unofficially
rooted, and developers (myself included) found ways to run
real Linux applications on it, including the PMA's <i>QTopia</i> user
interface. Sadly, Archos made it increasingly difficult to root the
device with subsequent firmware releases. Still, the Company did eventually
do the decent thing, and the later 'Internet Tablet' models had
user-flashable firmware. This led to the development of
<a href="http://dev.openaos.org" target="_blank">OpenAOS</a>, a PMA-style
firmware based on Angstrom Linux, on which I frittered away many
happy evenings. But I digress.
</p>
<p>
By the time Archos released the Internet Tablet, Android was
on the rise, and hackers turned
their attention away from QTopia and computer-style embedded Linux, towards
the more user-friendly Android. It was possible to flash early
versions of Android onto the
Internet Tablet, but they never worked very well. I can't recall whether
we were ever able to boot Android on the 605, but I think not.
At that time, I thought that QTopia was the future of embedded Linux
devices, but I was wrong. There just weren't enough people interested
in developing for QTopia, to produce any interesting applications.
Although nearly every Android app was, and is, rubbish, there was such
a huge developer base that a few good apps managed to sneak into the
ecosystem.
Later Archos products ran Android
officially but, by that time, Archos had lost its innovative edge,
and the tragic decline had begun.
</p>
<p>
Although mostly forgotten today, in the early 2000s Archos led the
portable media market, while Apple and the others limped along behind.
The 605 was an extraordinary achievement for its time -- it
offered decent sound quality, enormous storage, recording capabilities,
A/V integration, and a huge range of interesting accessories. Unlike
Apple's players, Archos never forced its users to use proprietary
software to install media on its players. It's a great
example of how having technically superior products, talented developers,
and vision does not
guarantee market success. Archos produced uncompromising
geek gadgets, little suited to the point-and-click generation.
</p>
<p>
An Archos media player was never a fashion statement and, in fact,
some of the early models were decidedly ugly. The AV500, in particular,
was laughably unsightly. Archos user interfaces made few concessions to
aesthetics or, indeed, logic. Archos did not solicit user feedback with
any enthusiasm, although it did run a beta-test program for a year or so.
I took part in this, along with a handful of other geeks.
Archos did fix bugs, but didn't implement any usability changes that we
recommended, so far as I can remember. The Company's attitude essentially
limited its customer base to hardcore technophiles.
</p>
<p>
There's also the unavoidable fact that hard drive-based portable devices
are horrible fragile. Archos did themselves no favours when they decided
not to make the drive user-replacable. Apple's hard-drive players did
not have this limitation; it's even possible (now) to replace the hard
drive in an iPod Classic with an SSD. What made the situation especially
galling was that the Archos devices were trivially easy to open up,
with nothing more than a screwdriver. It took five minutes to replace the
drive but, unless you bought it from Archos, it wouldn't work.
</p>
<p>
For all that, the 605 is a joy to use, once you've figured it out.
It sits nicely in the hand, and has a reassuring heft to it. The
605, like all the early Archos devices, is clearly not a cheap,
throw-away item.
</p>
<p>
I've singled out the 605 to write about in this article but, in fact, all the
early Archos devices are interesting. They all had unique capabilities,
many of which were never bettered. It's interesting to speculate
about here Archos might have gone, had the Company not been dragged
into fruitless, unwinnable, competition with Apple and Google.
</p>
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