Archos 405 review

If you're keen to take your films and TV programs on the road with you, but not so keen you want to pay £200 for the Archos 605 WiFi (125449 at www.computerbuyer.co.uk), have a look at the 405.

It's smaller and lighter than the 605, and does without the wireless networking and hard disk.

Instead of using a touchscreen, you control the player with the directional buttons on the right of the display. It's not as simple to use as the 605, but fine once you get the hang of it. Storage space is more of a problem. The 405 only has 2GB of memory on board, enough for around three films. Don't panic, though, because it also has a memory card slot which supports high-capacity SDHC cards. These go up to 16GB, and although a 16GB card currently costs around £100, prices will plummet over the next few months, with plenty of stockists to shop around.

To get files onto the player, you can copy them from your PC to a memory card and then insert it in the 405; plug the player in with a USB cable and copy files across by dragging and dropping; or synchronise your audio and video automatically using Windows Media Player. If you have ripped video files to play, the 405 supports DivX and XviD MPEG-4 files, but note that they have to be encoded with MP3 and not AAC audio unless you buy the optional AAC audio codec. You also have to buy an extra plug-in if you want to play back MPEG-2 files, such as the .VOB files from a DVD.

The 405's 3.5 inch screen is bright and clear, giving high contrast, so films look great, with vibrant colours. Less impressively, the screen is traditionally shaped rather than widescreen, so most films are heavily letterboxed. You can set the player to fill as much of the screen as possible by chopping off the sides, which is a reasonable compromise, but we just don't think any device these days really wants a screen that isn't widescreen.

Since it uses flash memory rather than a hard disk, the 405 has better battery life than most portable media players, managing five hours of video playback.

Author: Chris Finnamore