Well I've owned the Archos for less than a week but so far things are looking promising. Initially I had a fairly major issue with the screen - no, not the viewing angle, which, as has been highlighted by many, is poor but I only look at it straight on so it's not a problem to me. No, the problem I had was with the actual touch recognition. It didn't seem to register touch properly. I couldn't drag icons around the entire home screen. Some parts of the screen just didn't seem to allow dragging and parts of the virtual keypad where unresponsive. Happily there was a simple cure. I just ran the calibration commands from the 'repair & formatting' settings page. After that it's been well behaved. It's nice and responsive and all my presses register at the right points.
Probably the biggest disappointment is the low RAM. I couldn't find any detail before purchase as to how much it had and now I own one I can report it ain't a lot. My Desire on bootup has 240Mb free. The Archos, with even fewer startup programs, has just over 100Mb. That said, it doesn't seem to be causing me too much problem. The apps seem to run smoothly. Browsing is responsive - I use Xscope 1.5. The lack of flash is annoying but hopefully, as stated in a previous post, that'll be resolved in a week or two and for now I can just about cope.
The first thing I installed was GApps4Archos to get the real deal market. No problems encountered, GMail etc are installed and running happily.
The second problem I have encountered is WiFi sleeping on screen blank. This is a tad annoying and there doesn't seem to be the sleep policy from the WiFi Advanced options settings page. I've tried a couple of the market apps to try and keep it active to no avail. Again, I'm hoping the Froyo upgrade will resolve this one too. Fingers crossed.
Those issues aside, in use, the 101 is working well. I'm still working my way through the market to find the best apps for the things I want to use it for - namely; browsing, facebook, twitter, rss, newspapers and the odd blog post - the large keyboard is surprisingly accurate to use and I can actually get a reasonable typing speed going.
All in all I'm pleased with the purchase. I'm not going to claim it's as finished as the iPad and the wide screen aspect ratio, in my opinion, is not the ideal format for this type of device but it works surprisingly well in both portrait and landscape. I really thought that portrait would be too narrow for book reading and rss but it's actually fine and as yet I haven't come across any issues that I can put down to the larger size screen. For me the much cheaper price and the promise of Flash outweigh the polish of the iPad.
As to the battery life, I've been giving it a hammering today and used 35% in six hours fairly continuous use and I don't think that's bad at all. At the moment I give it the Mad Tech Report thumbs up. Mind you, if Froyo isn't just around the corner that's going to change...
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