It seems you can’t swing a dead cat these days without hitting some company that’s trying to put video in the palms of their customers. But whether it’s MTV streamed to your cell phone or latest episode of Lost downloaded to your iPod, the results seem less than satisfying on screen smaller than a box of Tic Tacs. For those who want their handheld video without carpel tunnel or eye strain, there is another option: the Archos AV500 Mobile Digital Video Recorder.

The AV500 is a personal media player that plays music, displays pictures and plays video on it’s built-in 4-inch color LCD – roughly double the size of the iPod screen. It comes with a 30GB hard drive standard (with an optional 100GB hard drive available), so it can store plenty of content for the user on-the-go.

But where the AV500 really shines is the quality of the video is can display on it’s built-in screen: up to 720 x 480 pixels or near-HDTV resolution. And if you don’t feel like holding the AV500 in your hand for a two-hour movie, you can plug it into a TV set and get up to 640 x 480 pixel resolution. By comparison, the iPod can only display video up to 320 pixels wide on it’s 2-inch built-in screen or 480 pixels on a TV.
The AV500 can also record off an analog TV source and can even do timed recording like a miniature TiVO. Unfortunately, the AV500’s scheduling software is far from the ease-of-use TiVO users are accustomed to – a definite opportunity for improvement.

The AV500 supports both NTSC ( U.S.) and PAL (Europe, Australia) playback and recording, making it a great option for international travellers.

Geek-o-Meter: We give it an “8″. The great video quality, ability to play both MPEG4 and MPEG2 compressed video, and larger storage capacity (up to 100GB) make the AV500 ideal for users who want “no-compromise” portable video player. Limited recording scheduler and a fairly wooden interface (compared to the iPod) are the only dings against an otherwise excellent gadget.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 3:49 pm and is filed under TECH. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.