Portable music, photo, video viewer , Portable hard drive

So what is that crazy title all about. I thought I would write about my experience with my portable mp3 player that does so much more. About 2 years ago I purchased a Archos Gmini 400 mp3 player for about $430 (CAD). It was expensive but well worth it.

Now I bought it for the purpose of having my music and a place to store digital pictures on my year long trip to Australia. That was my best pre-trip purchase decision I could have made. I can't imagine not having my music while I was travelling around. It's amazing how listening to music can take you home while you are away.

Now the Archos 400 isn't just an mp3 player. It acts as a external hard drive (usb) without any special software (drivers required) unlike the ipod of old. This was probably the biggest reason I went with this device over the Ipod. I have some friends who had Ipods and getting files off and onto them was a big headache.



Now the Archos 400 also does some other cool things. Another is the Audio/Video output which I've used a lot sometimes to watch movies or to play music through a stereo. Now the video support wasn't great with the first firmware; you needed to use Archos's software to convert the video for it to be compatible. But with the newest firmware a lot of the Xvid movies run fine (I've found some that have out-of-sync audio).

Now the Archos also has a CF Card reader and the ability to view pictures (slideshow and such). Now I find the photo viewing alittle slow with 5MegaPixel pictures but it wasn't the main use so no worries (also the screen isn't the best for viewing pictures). As I am now getting fairly serious about my digital photography I have been looking for a solution for backup on the go. Now the Archos is great when a computer is available but because my camera's use SD cards it isn't Ideal. I also find that with 10GB of music on the player it doesn't leave that much space for photo's (I also keep some movies on there). So what does that mean... a bigger hard drive of course. I looked around at some drives but they are very expensive when you get above 40 GB (1.8 in drives don't seem to be very common). So I started looking at new portable photo/music/video players with bigger hard drives. I found one on the Archos site but it doesn't include a card reader.... kinda defeats the purpose of buying it.

If anyone knows of another portable player with "all" features (video being the least important). For now I will stick with the Archos 400 (and CF to SD converter that is in the mail). Maybe I'm being too picky... seems anything you buy is a tradeoff in someway.


Gmini 402 closest to the 400 I have