Archos AV300 series MP4 Jukebox

Beautifully crafted, this device is a great example of the union of appliances. It's an external hard drive packed with features and a colour 3.8in LCD screen. This reeked of potential.

Beautifully crafted, this device is a great example of the union of appliances. It's an external hard drive packed with features and a colour 3.8in LCD screen. This reeked of potential.

Running off the battery, it's rated to provide 3.5 hours worth of video time and 10 hours of audio. After much exploring, we watched Jimmy Neutron and promptly bombed out half way through some 007 (a low battery warning would've been nice). When you considered it's not only pumping out both sound and video, but also juicing a hard drive, this was passable. But keep the power adaptor handy, as the battery was inbuilt.

The display was good quality -- great colour with no signs of blurring, but we had a problem with it being a tad on the dark side. Equipped with a microphone, recording quality was among the best we'd heard -- crisp and clean. The supplied headphones were also fairly good, but to clean your ear sockets out you'll want something a little more extreme.

You can set the device to use either the inbuilt 3.8in colour LCD or output to a TV for video and audio. In fact, this could both capture and output both video and audio to any device that's equipped with composite or S-Video jacks. It also came with an IR remote, so it'll be at your command at all times. An array of add-ons can be purchased, such as a 3.3 megapixel digital camera, video recorder and FM radio, so you’re not left dry for options.

Speaking of options, there are scads of them -- with power, sound and video adjustments -- tweaker's ecstasy. Though it's limited to a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 and only supports MPEG4 video (both DivX and XviD) -- to make things a little easier, but not very time friendly, a copy of Virtual Dub and a custom converting program were included to reduce resolutions.

It's expensive but almost worth every cent. Apart from several small quirks, a lot of effort went into development. This is what a portable media device is meant to be. Hot damn impressive.