Nice review but I'd like to suggest being more precise
Sure enough, Archos can legitimally be claimed to be trying to hide some costs by providing some things as plugins and accessories, but an other way to look at it would also be that Archos is providing the choice for people to personalise their product. Some people probably will be perfectly satisfied with the basic 200 euro 4GB version that plays DivX, WMV, Mp3, accesses the Content Portal and acts as media extender with Upnp/Samba over WiFi. Those plugins and accessories might reasonably be exclusively usefull for power users. Also you should point out that 13 pounds provides both h264 and aac codecs, or both mpeg2/vob and ac3 codecs. Those codecs have to be licenced, so if Archos included them in the basic package, they'd have to pay the licence even though less than half of the users ever will use those codecs.
FM is available through a 29 euro FM remote control, which doubles as a remote control, again no need for Archos to include it since not every user would like to pay for the FM radio remote control.
And about paying for browsers, if you have a browser in your mobile phone or PDA you most probably paid for it. And it can be said that people who buy the Microsoft XP/Vista OS are paying for Internet Explorer when it is bundled, and Mac users when they buy a Mac are paying for the development of Safari. The simple thing is Opera and Adobe charge a licence fee, though we don't know how much Archos is over-charging that licence fee, but most definately there is a licence fee. And since a large part of users might not even care to use the browser and WiFi, this way the basic unit cost can be cut by making it optional.
Nokia N800 and N770 aren't phones eigther. They do multimedia and storage pretty badly at Nokia while they have more of the PDA like features. So if you'd like to do more of the multimedia and internet multimedia stuff then Archos is for you, if you want PDA open-source apps with bad multimedia support then Nokia N-series is for you. Cowon Q5 is running Windows CE and is basically heavy, expensive and thus I don't think of the same class. As for iPod Touch provides less features and less storage at the same price levels though is more compact and may have a more attractive but not necessarilly more useful user interface.
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Nice review but I'd like to suggest being more precise
Sure enough, Archos can legitimally be claimed to be trying to hide some costs by providing some things as plugins and accessories, but an other way to look at it would also be that Archos is providing the choice for people to personalise their product. Some people probably will be perfectly satisfied with the basic 200 euro 4GB version that plays DivX, WMV, Mp3, accesses the Content Portal and acts as media extender with Upnp/Samba over WiFi. Those plugins and accessories might reasonably be exclusively usefull for power users. Also you should point out that 13 pounds provides both h264 and aac codecs, or both mpeg2/vob and ac3 codecs. Those codecs have to be licenced, so if Archos included them in the basic package, they'd have to pay the licence even though less than half of the users ever will use those codecs.
FM is available through a 29 euro FM remote control, which doubles as a remote control, again no need for Archos to include it since not every user would like to pay for the FM radio remote control.
And about paying for browsers, if you have a browser in your mobile phone or PDA you most probably paid for it. And it can be said that people who buy the Microsoft XP/Vista OS are paying for Internet Explorer when it is bundled, and Mac users when they buy a Mac are paying for the development of Safari. The simple thing is Opera and Adobe charge a licence fee, though we don't know how much Archos is over-charging that licence fee, but most definately there is a licence fee. And since a large part of users might not even care to use the browser and WiFi, this way the basic unit cost can be cut by making it optional.
Nokia N800 and N770 aren't phones eigther. They do multimedia and storage pretty badly at Nokia while they have more of the PDA like features. So if you'd like to do more of the multimedia and internet multimedia stuff then Archos is for you, if you want PDA open-source apps with bad multimedia support then Nokia N-series is for you. Cowon Q5 is running Windows CE and is basically heavy, expensive and thus I don't think of the same class. As for iPod Touch provides less features and less storage at the same price levels though is more compact and may have a more attractive but not necessarilly more useful user interface.