I can see one small flaw in this chain of thinking. No one (except maybe the Swiss) uses watches any more. Everyone these days uses their mobile/cell phone to tell the time.

Lol, I forgot just how mental Charbax was for Archos products. This guy takes obsession to entirely new levels. I hope he has his life savings invested in them or something, as this is the only way any human being could be so crazy about a company. Charbax makes even the most ardent of Apple fans look totally lame.

One other thing will say - I would hate for Archos to go down as a company, since they always were good innovators, but I will mirror what everyone else says in that they probably have the crappiest customer service in all of history.

Charbax may not have encountered this, but most of Archos's customers (both past and present) almost certainly have.

Lol, Charbax... Archos' own biggest walking advert...

This is a PMP. The other things you referred to and I referred to are not PMP's. Archos used to make half decent PMP's and PMP's only. They were usually ahead of the curve in terms of feature set - although typically the firmware always sucked and you had to wait for several iterations of this before Archos finally got it right. (Which they usually never did in the end anyway).

Still, it terms of feature set it was still often worth it to own a higher end Archos PMP regardless of this.

The netbook market is much harder for them to clearly define themselves. It's already badly overcrowded with 'samey' specification hardware and the competition in this market is likely to be fierce.

In any case there's no point comparing any Archos tablet with an Apple tablet, if for no other reason than the Archos tablet isn't an Apple tablet. The legendary Apple tablet, if it ever happens, is pretty likely to be in a device category of its own, and simply for the fact of it being an Apple tablet, it will be difficult to find anything else to compare it to.

The Archos tablet on the other hand, is just another tablet - and not the best possible tablet PC choice available if reports are to be believed.

I don't want to get into a long debate with Charbax, as he probably thinks the guys at Archos could walk on water, but if Archos went back to exclusively doing PMP's (which is what they're good at), it would be interesting to see what they could come up with.

I wish Archos would get back to just making PMP's - instead of dicking around with this whole netbook thing they've been into lately.

I like this one better:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/23/motoring-land-speed-record

A 140MPH tea kettle... Nice...

NO Daleks in Star Trek. Would be neat if they put in a guest appearance one day though....

It's just a numbers game really, once you get enough geeks gathered round and jerking off into the same technology pot over the same topic, it's only a matter of time before Apple produces the goods.

It's not however a sure fire winner (whatever it is), as Apple has done plenty of stuff before that has flopped.

If it's just a low powered under-featured device that they intend to sell at a vastly inflated price (as seems to be the norm with Apple), then it's future is by no means secured.

I bought every Archos device right up to the latest 5 series. They are sweet machines, no doubt. But they have become so feature packed, they are literally just small tablet PC's - while still lacking a great many of the features and flexibility that small PC's of this kind have.

If Archos want to compete in the new netbook space - which is probably a good target market during hard times like these, open the devices up fully to third party apps like Apple did and let users use them in whatever way they see fit. They are too small to be full blown PC's perhaps (although users should be able to decide on this also) and too large and heavy to be convenient to carry media players.

So leave it up to the customer to work out the best uses for themselves.

Still no iPod classic support?