New Archos Devices Offer Some Real Differentiation

Michael Gartenberg | June 15, 2007, 12:30 PM

I had a nice chat today with the Archos folks about some of their new devices and it's an impressive lineup. Most importantly, they're doing some nice differentiation in their products. First up is they have a 160gb version so for the moment, they're king of the hill in capacity. Second, they've made WiFi a useful feature. In addition to surfing the web, I can use actually use the device to play Flash content so YouTube is totally supported. Excellent!. I can also download content directly from Cinema Now and the fact this supports network UPnP makes it useful device on the home network. The fact that it's extensible as a platform means someone could really turn this into the ultimate podcast device. There's more. For sometime, Archos has been pushing the notion of recording directly to the device, that's a feature that's been somewhat limited since there was no EPG. Yes, there were klugey ways to do it, but they all were lousy. Finally, there's an integrated EPG that's updated over WiFi making one touch recordings a reality. That's a huge feature that is going to go a long way to making this device stand out.

Archos still has huge challenges ahead. Differentiation is fine as long as you can get the word out what the device can do. Archos really needs some iPhone style ads to demonstrate what their units are capable of and why a consumer would want to make the purchase over competing devices.