Rating: 
Summary: a followup to my January 24 review
Review: As of 1/24, I received a defective player with only a half-functional LCD display. My second Archos 6000 arrived over the weekend, just as promised by Amazon. After charging it up, it worked without a problem. The LCD display was perfect, the sound quality was awesome and song transfer was no more difficult than transferring songs from folder to folder on my computer. What a wonderful piece of machinery...but read on...The next day, I went to listen to this little wonder again, and when I touched it, I noticed that it had gotten extremely hot while the battery had been charging...I nearly burned myself when trying to pick it up. I unplugged the power cord and went to turn the player on. It displayed a green light for about 3 seconds, and then made some groans and grunts before shutting off. After trying about 10 more times over the next few hours, I printed the return label off of Amazon and packed up the two defective players for return. UPS is coming tomorrow. Please don't overlook the bad reviews the way I did. I am not usually one to review products online, however I feel that it is important that people know what they are getting into when they wish to purchase the Archos jukebox. I did not want to be the naïve, uneducated customer, but even after researching the product, I got burned (Literally!!!) I wanted so badly for this player to work, but it failed me both times. I searched for tech. support which is virtually nonexistent. The 800 number no longer exists and I could have written a better manual than the one that they included in the box. I hate to disappoint any potential buyers, but please be warned...this is not a well made piece of hardware, and for this much money, I want something that not only impresses me (the way the archos did initally with its cool looks and huge storage capacity) but ACTUALLY WORKS! I have decided to take a break from the mp3 market for a while, but will probably be shopping for a Nomad player in a few months...hopefully the price will have come down a bit, and they will have figured out a way to increase battery life.
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Summary: Archos Technical Support
Review: My review is not directed solely at this product, but at the Archos technical support. That support is virtually non-existent. I have tried numerous times over the last month via both email and phone to reach their support team, but have had no success. I have sent 4 separate emails, and called twice. I have received no reply to my email (not even the friendly "auto-reply" that at least reminds you that their email server works), and spent a few of my own long distance dollars on interminable hold since they do not have a toll free number. I even called the main number in Irvine and got the sympathetic receptionist to try to connect me to the tech support staff. Despite her willingness to help, she wasn't able to pull that off. After a little coaxing, she did give me the direct email addresses of two of what she thought were the more responsive members of the technical support staff. That didn't help either. Still no reply. All this is necessary since (depending on which Archos product you buy) you may or may not have any technical support info available to you on their website. In my case, there was none. If you feel that an Archos product is a "must have", keep the receipt. Your only recourse may be to return it if you have ANY problem with it after purchase. I doubt that you will get anywhere with their technical support program. Good luck.
Rating:
Summary: not the best mp3 player you can buy
Review: very usless and dangerous!!!!!! I got mine a month ago and first of all you cant even change the volume setting once you ajust it. Second the battery life is terrible and doesnt even last the one whole day. LAST I WAS RECHARGING IT OVER NIGHT AND THE NEXT MORNING THE MP3 PLAYERS MIDDLE BUTTON HAD COMPLETLY MELTED, JUST FROM RECHARGING IT!!!
Rating: 
Summary: If you own a Mac, get the IPod. (UPDATED 3/02)
Review: Here's the skinny: If you own a Macintosh, buy the iPod, it's worth the money and in a direct side by side comparison, the iPod has better sound output. HOWEVER, if you are stuck with USB, this thing does the trick. I have one, and have not had any problems with it being "delicate". I've even dropped it a few times.
PRO's: It's a hard drive, with simple file system navigation, so how you lay out your music folders it is how it displays them. When playing, it uses the ID3 tags to show the track name information. It uses (4) NiMH rechargeables and can go upwards of 9 hours with the new 1800mAh batteries. In a pinch, it can use AA batteries. It's fairly small, fits in your hand, although not in your pocket. It works on PC or Mac very very easily. You can just drag your music files over. THE NEWEST FIRMWARE UPDATE is really cool, and allows you to create playlists on the fly, as well as cueup tracks. This alone shows Archos' dedication to their product! Furthermore, they can fairly easily be hacked. I just "upgraded" mine to a 40GB drive (2.5" wide 9.5mm tall, 4500RPM, format FAT32)
CONS: Not any more...the new firmware release answered all my previous problems.
Anyway, this player is pretty damn cool if you consider the much costlier, lower spaced (solid state memory) or file-system-nightmare (the cd-based MP3players). They don't skip like CDs and the sound quality on playback is good. Great for the frequent flier.
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Summary: Lots of potential, but...
Review: ...I chose the Archos 6000 because its style and battery life are superior to that of the Nomad. I was so excited yesterday when the package came, and although I was aware of the bad reviews that this player had received, I was not too worried about the condition of mine. As soon as I plugged the thing in, I had trouble. The LCD display only displayed one of the two lines of text properly. The second line only displayed the bottom few pixels of the text, rendering the product useless. Everything seemed to work mechanically. I had no problem playing the songs that were pre-loaded into the jukebox, however I could not get it to work with my computer. This is completely ridiculous considering that I am working with Windows 2000 on a brand new HP Pavillion purchased in late 2001. Amazon's customer support was extremely helpful (5 stars to them!!) and I should receive a replacement Archos 6000 tomorrow at no extra shipping charge. If it still does not work on my computer, I am definitely going for the nomad and I guess I will just have to deal with the significantly reduced battery life. A small price to pay for a product that actually works! I will write a follow-up review when I get my new player. I hope this can help some potential buyers.
Rating: 
Summary: DON'T REVIEW till you've had it a while ..
Review: .. you may have to revise your opinion. Great while it worked (3 months). Liked the simple file drag-n-drop, ability to store data files, and compact size. After a while it would not start up even after recharging the batteries as usual.
Swopped with the spare set of batteries and it worked again. After another few weeks, switching it on would cause the screen to light up briefly, then die.
Never got it to work again. Still looking for a replacement. Any recommendations for a similar but RELIABLE jukebox?
Rating: 
Summary: 6gig or 64mb (bigmac or tic tac)
Review: Great product now it comes with a $... mail-in-rebate this is one of the best mp3 players out there. Only problem I've found is the batteries die to quick but you get two sets of rechargeable batteries. Better then those 64mb you get 6gigs are you crazy buy this now ...
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Summary: Horrible build quality, broke in 2 days
Review: This product has a very cheap, flimsy feel (soft grey plastic casing) with poor all around design. First I noticed you must pop of the sides to get to batteries (those cylindrical sides in picture). This is fairly difficul and led to scratches on the case before I could even use it. I bought one this summer and it broke under normal use in 2 days. I never dropped or mishandled it, it simply started showing gibberish on the screen such as $%->?@ etc instead of text... even when I pressed keys in proper order based on memory it would not play. The sound quality was decent, but not what I'd expect from such a relatively high price item. In my opinion, this is not a good product, which I suppose is to be expected from a no name brand... Perhaps they have improved it since June to address these problems, but it is my suggestion that you save your time and money and go with a name brand such as Creative or I/O Magic.
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Summary: Update to my September 28 review
Review: Ok, so I'm a little mad at the two people (to date) who said my original review (that I spent an afternoon working on) wasn't helpful. That's ok though, many more people were helped. I did want to address some of the questions and complaints from some of the other reviews: 1) You do not need the included MusicMatch software to upload mp3's to this player. I recommend you don't even install it. You can easily copy files using Windows Explorer to the player as it acts like another hard drive. 2) Yes, the documentation is awful. No matter, if you know how to copy files from one drive to another you can operate this thing. 3) I think I have noticed a limitation. It skips on occasion when files are encoded at rates higher than 192kbps. Most don't go above this level anyway, but I'm pretty sure the occasional skips I get in the music are because the files are large and the drive is not reading ahead fast enough. Rare occurrence, though. 4) Tech support is nonexistent. I've emailed them numerous times about general questions they don't include in their FAQ. Sometimes they get back, most of the time they don't. The one question I still wonder about is whether a defrag program like MS Defrag or Norton Speeddisk is ok to use on this thing. 5) Batteries generally take about 1.5 hours to recharge for every hour of use. I still haven't used it to the point where it runs out of power completely but I just plug it in before going to bed and it's usually fully charged by the time I wake up. 6) If you think you'll want to use it as a portable recording device, be sure to compare this to the recorder/player Archos also sells. This device doesn't have a recording ability. Also note they've come out with a 20GB player if you are an insane music nut. I think that's it. Like I said before, I can't hang with those little 128MB players. It's a bummer you can't take it jogging like the memory players, but until they come out with mp3 players with 6GB of memory I'll still say a hard-drive mp3 device like the Archos is the way to go. Hope this helps.
Rating:
Summary: Good Idea, Bad Execution!
Review: It is a great idea, but the quality is poor. I am returning the unit because it seems to have many bugs. The technical support and customer service is non-existant, they don't return phone calls or e-mails. The instruction manual is useless, I probably would have returned it for this reason alone even if the unit worked. It takes a good amount of computer knowledge to get it up and running and then downloading songs. There are other high capacity players available now that are much better than this unit.
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