Archos was a bit skimpy when it came to details about their newest line of DAP’s. All I was able to gather from the French sites covering the conference was that the Archos 2 Vision was a “slider version of the Archos 2″. Now that I see the player, that description actually makes sense. The Archos 2 Vision has a touch-sensitive horizontal slider on the front that’s used to scroll through your music, as well as control the volume. Other than that, it’s a pretty basic player. Check out the spec list below:
Features
- Capacity: 8 and 16GB plus microSD slot
- Display: 2.0″ (220×176)
- Audio: MP3, and WMA
- Video: AVI (transcoding required)
- FM Tuner and Recorder
- Battery life: 10 hours for audio, 4 for video
- Dimensions: 82mm x 44mm x 9mm
Will Archos ever realize 10 hours of battery life just doesn’t cut it anymore? At least you’re not paying too much for it. The 8GB model wilt retail for 60 Euros, and the 16GB for 99 Euros. You can expect similar prices for the US market.
LINK
Don’t you just hate when a company announces a new player, just to tell you that it won’t be available for months? Yeah, me too! It’s even worse when someone else gets their hands on one before you. Like Cnet, who held Steve Ballmer hostage until Microsoft gave them a Zune HD to play with (make that two actually). Since I’m not the kidnapping kind of guy, all I can do is sit here and caress my monitor as I look at these new shots of the ZHD. Okay, I’m not really caressing my monitor, but still, the player looks pretty amazing.
I’m sure most of our readers already know what the Zune HD has to offer but it’s worth repeating. It has a 3.3″ OLED touchscreen, runs on the powerful Nvidia Tegra chip, has a built-in HD radio, as well as a full-screen web browser, and can output video in 720P. But wait there’s more! Donald Bell of Cnet has confirmed that the Zune HD will be using the same Wolfson sound chip found in last gen Zunes. Microsoft has brought back preset equalizers, though sadly custom EQ’s are still nowhere to be found.
Another nice addition is the retrieval of related media for any song playing. According to Mr. Bell the Zune “automatically pulls in a gallery of band photos, biographical info, and similar artist recommendations for any currently playing song–regardless of whether the track is from Zune Marketplace or your friend’s hard drive or torrents.” Pretty cool stuff. Though we still don’t know everything there is to know about this player, the Zune HD is shaping up to be a killer device when it arrives this Fall.
I just realized it might be easier for me to hold Donald Bell for ransom, than Ballmer. Do you see the trouble I have to go through to please you dapreview readers!
Zune HD Preview
