Today, I am going to be telling you about the Archos 705 WiFi. I received mine as a gift for my birthday in June and have been playing with it ever since. The first thing I noticed about the player was the size of it. It is larger than you would expect. My wife has an Archos 605 WiFi but the 705 dwarfs it at 7.05″ x 4.96″ x .775″. The entire 605 is the size of the screen on the 705.

The 705 also comes with a remote that works without having the dock. Surprisingly, I used it more than I thought I would. The ability to skip 30 sec was my favorite feature of the remote. I was also surprised that it worked from across a room.

The screen of the 705 is 7″ with a resolution of 800×480, which is roughly the resolution of a DVD (720×480). I have watched many videos on the 705 at different resolutions and bit rates, and the 705 handles them very well. It has a zoom feature so you can make a full screen movie wide screen, but i do not recommend it. The screen is crisp and has a fast refresh rate with little artifacts during fast action scenes. The biggest problem I have with the screen is that it does not show up in bright sunlight very well.

Let me start talking about the audio quality of the 705 by saying I am not an audiophile, but I believe it is on par if not better then my 60 gig ipod video. I hate the headphones that come with the ipod and the 705 so I used a pair from Sony, the MDR-EX51 to be exact. The sound was crisp and clear.

I was lucky enough to get the 160 gig version so space wasn’t an issue. I was able to put all my videos and photos on the 705 and still have room left over for more. I thought I would fill it up easily but I had to search for things to put on it.

Finding something that I could use to convert my videos with was easy. I used a program called media encoder. It will convert almost anything into the proper codec. I found xvid with mp3 audio and a MP4 wrapper worked best for me. I am still toying with the settings so I may find something better.

The 705 has the ability to read pdf files, but it is hit or miss. If the pdf is mostly text then their are very little problems. On the other hand, if the pdf file has a lot of graphics in it, then you are going to wait about 30 sec for each page to load.

Battery life was surprising to me. Watching videos it would vary depending on the bit rate and resolution of the video, but i would get roughly 3 to 4 hours with DVD resolution video. With audio I never ran the battery down completely before watching a video. I did have it playing for almost 10 hours straight on a trip and the battery indicator only dropped to its half way mark.

I didn’t try any of the plug-ins so I don’t know if they are worth picking up or not. I can convert any video podcast easily with media encoder to xvid and the web browser isn’t very useful to me because the 705 is a little big to be carrying around with you everywhere. Any audio podcasts i download are normally in mp3 format so no need for the aac codec. I also don’t have Dish Network so I couldn’t even try out the free one.

A few issues that I have with the player are that you need a proprietary cable to play it on your TV. To record a show you need to have the doc. The lack of buttons leads to lots of fingerprints on the screen (I can never the styli when I need it). It will not charge from the usb port. You have to plug it in or it drains the battery even though it is plugged into the computer so you always have to carry around the charger.

Overall, I really like the 705. It has a large crisp screen that is easy on the eyes, the audio is very good, and for the same price as an 80 gig ipod I think it is well worth it. If you are looking for a good player with a lot of features, I would highly recommend this player. If the screen is a little big for you then get the 605.