Archos @ CES - The Pocket Media Assistant PMA430

We spent some precious moments yesterday afternoon with the Archos crew, mainly because we were dying to get a look at their new Pocket Media Assistant PMA430. For the specialists in the house, this used to be called the AV500 and was first unveiled (a bit prematurely, we might add) back at the CeBIT tech trade show in Germany this past March. Anyway, the reason everyone's jazzed up about the PMA430 is that it's a Linux-based portable audio and video player with a 30GB hard drive and an LCD touch screen that also doubles as a PDA. They've loaded it up with lots of other niceness too: built-in 802.11b WiFi, USB host (for connecting a keyboard or dumping photos from a digital camer), a removeable battery, and support for Mophun and Qtopia games. Because it runs on Linux you can install new applications for the PMA430, and there are plans to introduce an SDK next month. Of course we also snapped a mess of pics.