Hands-on with the Archos 605 fifth-gen PVP

By Nate Lanxon on 15 June 2007, 9:46am

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In a small, luxurious private cinema in London's Soho district, Archos yesterday unveiled to us its fifth generation of portable media players, the flagship of which is the Archos 605.

There's been a good deal of buzz surrounding the new devices, despite the product range's slogan 'Entertainment your way' being as vague as it is enticing. Well, they had good reason to tell us something big was coming because the new 605 PVP is very impressive indeed.

The 605 is a really slim media player, with the 4GB and 30GB models only 15mm thick (capacities go up to 160GB). Archos also mentioned new 105, 405 and 705 players, but didn't reveal any major details. The 105, however, is a simple flash-based MP3 player that'll sell for around £60.

The 605 has a 109mm (4.3-inch) touch-screen display, with a resolution of 800x480 pixels. It's built on a new version of Linux, has fully integrated Wi-Fi and can be used to browse the Internet thanks to the Opera browser. Flash is fully supported, so sites such as YouTube work perfectly. In fact, not only do YouTube's embedded videos play perfectly -- including in full-screen mode -- but videos can be uploaded to YouTube directly from the device itself, without any need of a computer. Click on for more photos, dear chums...

Update: a Archos 605 WiFi review is now live on the site