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The Archos 7 Returns!

Dower — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:13:49 +0000

My Archos 7 arrived back in the mail yesterday. It was both a happy and sad occasion. I was happy to get it back, but sadly, something was amiss!

The Archos looked like mine, but apparently, without warning, Archos deleted everything off of it. Now, I don’t know if this is common practice for them, or if something indeed was wrong with the unit (not just the battery). It appears I will never know, since there was no correspondence to inform me…

What bothers me the most, is that I could do nothing to back up the device before sending it off back to them. For those that may not have followed my previous posts about this, the Archos 7 does not work without the battery in, which was impossible to resolve for me since, I only had one battery, and there was no way it was going to fit back into the unit. So over 100gb worth of music videos got disposed of.

So, in the end, I’m happy to get it back, but sad that all my data is gone. Now, I’m left pondering the reliability of the device, wondering if it’s worth trying to load it up again with all the stuff I had before, just to possible relive this scenario 6 months from now. I guess we’ll see.

It’s up to Archos now

Dower — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:11:06 +0000

Well, earlier this week Archos finally got my player. They had me send the entire thing back, which I guess is ok, since I can’t use the device anyway (recall in my earlier post that the Archos 7 is nothing but a brick without a battery attached). Hopefully they’ll get it back to me soon. Sadly I’ve lost quite a bit of confidence in their product now, which probably marks the last Archos I ever buy. It’s a shame, the Archos 7 is a nice media player, it had great battery life, but I just can’t get over the battery bulge, and the fact that without the battery, it just doesn’t work! Will Archos be making Archos 7 batteries forever? What happens 6 months from now? Will my battery bulge again? Archos doesn’t even sell the battery online, so if it happens again out of warranty then what? Charge me a ton of cash for an out-of-warranty battery repair later? Everything else I own works without their battery, I just plug it in… Archos made a poor choice in this design. Maybe I’m being to harsh on them, but I just don’t like living with this liability.

2 Days and No RMA!

Dower — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 03:09:27 +0000

Well, it’s been 2 days so far. After contacting them Sunday night at 10pm, It’s now Tuesday night at 10:30pm and I’m still waiting. They actually sent me an email pretty quick on Sunday night, asking for my proof of purchase, which I immediately sent back to them as a PDF. Now not a peep. I called this morning only get a guy saying it takes time to process my request (nice). Meanwhile, I can’t use the damn thing because it doesn’t work without the battery (even better). So far, I’m less than thrilled. This may be my first and last Archos I ever buy… 6 months folks! Their warranty is 1 year, and in half that time the battery is dead leaving me with a $500 320gb brick! I guess I wouldn’t be so mad if I could still use it with the AC adapter, but I can’t… It leaves me wondering about the future of this investment.

Today, I have pictures of my lovely battery. Enjoy.

Another view of the bulging battery

Yep, it's not going back in there anytime soon.

Notice how well the battery fits now!

Top view of the battery showing the bulging battery compartment

Notice how lovely the bulge is from this angle!

Archos 7 Battery Bulge Horror!

Dower — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:17:44 +0000

I’ve not written much about my Archos 7, but I need to write today! I’ve had my Archos 7 since December; it was a lovely Christmas gift from my wife. I’ve been using it regularly for the last 6 months; not heavily, but I’ve used it for good stretches of time on my business trips, and when I needed to finish a television series during lunch. All in all, I’ve been pleased with it. But today – the horrot! I pull it out to find the battery was in an odd position… It appeared popped out. My first impression was that someone must have dropped it and the battery got knocked loose, but the battery wouldn’t go back in, and upon further inspection, I noticed that battery had buldged and popped out of it’s casing and thus popping out of the Archos!

I’ve never experienced this, and it looks like googling around no-one has either, and Archos obviously isn’t saying much about it on their site. The disheartening thing about this, is their warranty period is only 6 months, and I just reached my 6th month… So I had to call support.

Archos boasts 7 day a week CST support and today is Sunday. I tried in the morning, but gave up. This evening I was able to get someone, an American sounding person too! Apparently the guy at the other end wasn’t surprised to hear about this, I guess it seems that this is a common problem. He didn’t give me a hard time and I will be able to RMA my battery.

I’m not sure what to make of this so far… I’ve owned quite a number of devices, and I’ve never had a battery do this before… I mean, I’ve had batteries go bad, but nothing like this.

I’ll write back and add images about what it looks like tomorrow.