Archos PMA400

The new Archos PMA400 is a 30GB multimedia player (music, photos, videos), an audio and video recorder, a PDA, a wireless Web browser, and a game machine. In fact, it's everything but a cell phone and camera. At $750 street, the Linux-based PMA400 costs as much as a notebook computer. But it does just about everything you'd want a multimedia computer to do, and you can slip it into a jacket pocket.

The solid 10-ounce device is dominated by a 3.6-inch color touch screen. In addition to the usual rocker controls, you can use a stylus or fingernail to navigate on-screen. Handwriting recognition is built in for the PDA, Web browser, e-mail client, and other functions that require text input.

Poor audio performance is a deal breaker for us, so we loaded the PMA400 with our suite of listening selections and test tones. We were delighted by the warm, unconstrained sound of the player, which seemed to have power to spare and plenty of response in the lower registers. We knew, however, that a dose of even-order harmonic distortion could make the music sound artificially warm and pleasant, and we hoped that this wasn't the case. We needn't have worried. When we ran our frequency response, harmonic distortion, and bass response tests, the PMA400 racked up the best results we've yet seen. The player had essentially no measurable background noise, a flat frequency response (except for being a couple of decibels down between 20 and 30 Hz), and insignificant amounts of harmonic distortion at any frequency, even with the tone controls cranked all the way up.

The only aspect of the audio performance that we found even slightly objectionable was the occasional random tick, probably as the player was accessing its hard disk. The PMA400 has power to spare, easily sustaining 107-dB to 110-dB levels in the provided earbuds and hitting a 118 dB peak. This player can damage your hearing, but if you keep the volume level reasonable, you'll be rewarded with all the transient power you need for deeply satisfying reproduction throughout the rest of the range.

The audio-recording features are the most comprehensive that we've seen so far in a portable multimedia device, with excellent quality. The PMA400 can record WAV or MP3 files, the latter at three different quality levels (up to 48 KHz / 192 Kbps). You can record from line, internal microphone, or external mic. Large on-screen VU meters are responsive, and a slider adjusts recording level. With the handwriting input, you can even label your recordings as you make them.

The screen is 320 by 240 pixels, supporting 262,000 colors. Although resolution not as fine as in the 640-by-480 screens we've seen on the Olympus m:robe and the Epson P-2000 photo viewer, the pixel spacing is tight, the viewing angle is wide, and still images and video look good. In photo mode, the PMA400 scales your images to fit its screen, and it lets you zoom and pan the images. You can view them singly, 4-up, 9-up, or 16-up, select them from the touch screen, and flip through full-size images by dragging on the screen. The broad viewing angle and accurate color rendition make the unit a fine way to share your photos with friends.

You could certainly enjoy a movie on a plane, too. We loaded a copy of Moulin Rouge to see how the PMA400 would handle the dark, shadowy scenes and the lurid colors, and we were pleasantly surprised at the clarity and the contrast range—enough to convey the three-dimensionality of the movie's opening scenes.

You can record video directly to the PMA400, using the provided TV cradle, which comes with its own user manual. The cradle has a full range of wires to connect to your AV system, complete with an infrared remote control for recording, playback, navigation, and timer setup for unattended recording. It even has an infrared emitter that lets the PMA400 change the channel on your cable box or tuner. Although it's no replacement for your TiVo, it is, in fact, a reasonably capable video recorder. Playback on the PMA400 looks great; playback on the TV is sharp but has some aliasing, because you've reduced and digitized the TV's native resolution to 512 by 384 pixels.

The Qtopia PDA applications include a calendar, contacts, a to-do list, a text editor, e-mail, a PDF viewer, and the Opera browser. Web pages are not scaled; you see a quarter of the screen at a time. The calendar and contacts can sync with Outlook. If you're used to the speed of a flash-based PDA, you may find the 5 or so seconds that the PMA400 takes to load each application an annoyance, but they all work well. Handwriting recognition is accurate and reasonably speedy, but we were able to enter text faster with the stylus and little pop-up QWERTY keyboard. And lest we forget, the PMA400 has a slew of classic computer games, plus some unique ones from Mophun.

You can network the PMA400 wirelessly or through a USB-to-Ethernet adapter. The network setup accepts a WEP key for secure communications and can hold multiple configurations. Network setup is straightforward.

The price may scare many potential buyers away, which is a shame. If you add up the cost of getting all this functionality separately, the PMA400 is not so exorbitant.