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American Airlines offering PMPs to upper class fliers
Bored and lonely first class and business class transcontinental fliers on American Airlines will now be treated to branded Archos players to while the time away with pre-loaded video and audio programming. Such premium fliers will be able to opt for an Archos 704, while all passengers on MD-80 flights between LA and Chi-town can get an Archos 605 to play with -- though the economy peeps have to pay. AA is packing the 704 with Bose Noise Canceling headphones, and the 604 with "high-end" earbuds, and has feature films, TV, news, music videos, AA radio and music CDs pre-loaded. Right now American Airlines is running a four month test of the service, which is sure to incur a few more thefts then those headrest-mounted displays cropping up on certain airlines, but a nice bit of good will from discerning portable media consumers.[Via PocketSynch]
Archos 704 photographed in the wild
Hot on the heels of Archos releasing the source code for its Generation 4 lineup of portable media players comes a bevy of snapshots of the company's elusive 704 "mobile DVR," complete with claims that it's already available for purchase in some parts of the world. While we'd seen a few grainy photos of the unit before, and just recently got a bit more information regarding the innards, we finally have something substantial to go by. According to an ArchosFans user, his shiny new 704 supports the DVR Station used by the 604, offers up just 40GB of internal storage, and comes with a pair of USB 2.0 ports, headphones, cabling, two styli, an 800 x 480 resolution display, wireless remote, charger, and the obligatory WiFi functionality. It was noted that the 40GB of built-in space was a small letdown, but the ease of hooking up an external HDD somewhat "mitigated that limitation." Still, you better know quite well that this will make all your dreams come true, because ringing up at $1,099SGD ($717), this thing doesn't come cheap -- but even if you're not down with coughing up that much dough for this bad boy just yet, feel free to click through for a few more glamor shots of a retail 704.[Via GenerationMP3]
More Archos 704 specs spilled
This one is just looking hotter every minute. According to a product page at Beach Audio which has seemingly jumped the gun -- though by how much is unclear, still no release date -- the 704 Mobile DVR from Archos has a 7-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen, sufficient for playing DVDs at full resolution. There's also an 80GB HDD, and the ability to stream video straight from your PC over WiFi. The wording is a bit unclear, but it sounds like the DVR functionality comes from a USB add-on accessory or dock. Beach Audio is quoting a rather odd $527.99 price for the unit, and we're still unclear on a few things, but what we are pretty sure of is that the 704 is going to be a major contender for your internet tablet / portable video dollar.[Via Generation MP3 and ArchosLounge]
Archos 704 "Mobile DVR" with WiFi unveiled, thanks FCC
Archos wasn't joshing around with this whole WiFi bit, and while that 604 WiFi of theirs might've gotten dinged a bit in the reviews, it seems that they're back for more with this new 704 WiFi that the FCC so kindly has revealed to us. Very little is known about the functionality so far, but that whole "Mobile DVR" tag on the name could imply that Archos is packing a bit more TV-centric functionality into the device -- rumors have mentioned the possibility of a built-in TV tuner -- or perhaps just trying to position the same old, same old a tad bit better in the market. From what we can tell from the pic, we would say the screen is a decent bit larger than the 604's 4.3-inches, possibly even the 7-inches that rumors suggest, and from what specs we have, we know there's a CPU (duh), flash memory (most likely for buffering), a hard drive (double duh), 802.11b/g WiFi and DDR2 RAM inside this thing. Hopefully whatever is under the hood will be enough to pep up that GUI for more productive WiFi-based web browsing. Perhaps the best news in all this is that the FCC is totally breaking Archos' confidentially request on this one, which should be in effect for another 15 days or so, meaning Apple's hopes of keeping iPhone docs under wraps until June 15th just got that much slimmer. Peep another shot after the break.
