Digital Home Thoughts: Archos TV+ 250GB Review

"So it seemed a natural progression when the company announced it was branching out, and adding a static set-top box-style network media streamer and recorder to its range. The TV+, as it's known, does everything the 605 can do, but doesn't have the constraint of portability and so is able to offer far more storage (250GB of it to be precise) to store all your video, music and photos on. Sounds great, doesn't it? Well it did until I hooked the TV+ up and began to play around with it. The thing is, what looks like a remarkable feat for a portable player simply doesn't translate to a device designed to sit permanently beneath your telly. And that's precisely what the TV+ is: a non-portable version of the 605 Wi-Fi, with the same user interface, menu system and an almost identical range of capabilities."

As I was reading this review, I was pretty much thinking the same things that the article concludes - "It's not a particularly good media streamer. It's not an elegant alternative to Sky Plus or a decent twin-tuner DVR. Its on-demand content is as-yet limited, and its user interface is clunky". Although this gets me thinking that launching this kind of a device is now becoming something of a syndrome - launch a beta and hope for the best. I wish Archos has thought about the end-to-end experience before launching a sub-par product, no matter how many overall features they tried to pack in.