Detailed Archos ONDIO MP3 Player Description & Review

Archos: ONDIO £111.92inc. VAT  &  Delivery

This model has been superceded by players such as the Archos GMini XS100 3GB MP3 player.

The Archos FM Ondio 128. A.k.a. The Ondio.

The name looks a little like the word Onion, but don't let that put you off this little device. It's smaller than it looks for a start. The image makes it look quite large, but it's not much bigger than a 10 pack of cigarettes.

What the Ondio can do for you:

Store a couple of hours of MP3s - ideal for commute to/ from work.

Spend your entire commute to work dictating notes into your Ondio. Even if your commute to work lasts 4 hours.

Alternatively you can listen to FM Radio anywhere on the FM bandwidth from 108 - 88 MHz

If you want to record a track from the radio, or you hear one of those "I cannot believe what the DJ just said" moments you can record direct to the memory and - just like the old FM20, Archos's other best selling MP3 Jukebox - you can not only record, but also capture, automatically, up to 30 seconds of radio time before you pressed record.

Battery life is good too with 'up to 12 hours' from 3 AAA batteries.

You can easily move MP3s to and from your Ondio, just like the way that you would choose a CD for your CD player in the morning before you go out the door, except this time you can mix and match tracks to suit your current mood, or create a completely different mood for the day.

Those features are all pretty good. It's nice to see technology moving in the right direction - the base rate memory for this unit is 128MB, which is good. The unit comes with a built-in Radio, which is good (though in truth the Intel Pocket Concert also came with these features).

Where it differs from the old Intel is first of all it does not cost 3 times the amount it should. Second, the battery life is much better. You could actually use this little Jukebox on a long bus trip - the Intel would have bled out of life after a few hours.

The best ideas are always obvious after the event and the Retro Record feature is definitely one of those after-the-event ideas. If you miss the start of the song you have been waiting to record there is no need to hurry with flustered fingers to try to get the record function working quickly as you lose vital seconds of intro. You have a full 30 seconds to press record. Or not. This presents more opportunity to be cool about the whole thing.

That's still not the best part though. The best part is that Archos have not designed early obsolescence into this RAM player from the outset. The base memory is 128MB of RAM. Not particularly huge when compared to the HD giants with their 20GB of storage.

But, and it's a big but: BUT, you can expand the amount of Memory that your jukebox has.

There is a big caveat with that statement - one that many sites (including Archos' own website) tend to gloss over. The expansion card and the base memory cannot be used concurrently. For example, each Ondio has 128MB built-in. If you added a Multi Media Card (MMC) with 64MB of storage, how much storage would that give you? The logical answer would be 192MB, but it would be wrong. The actual amount of memory you can use if you add a card of 64MB would be 64MB. Adding a MMC replaces the internal memory. You can either use the internal memory OR a MMC, not both at the same time.

The MP3s stored on the internal memory will not show up and cannot be accessed while you have an expansion Multi Media Card attached. What use is that? Well, the internal memory is still there, so you could keep your hardcore favourite trax; your desert island tunes, on the internal memory, and use the expansion card as your daily choice. When you have done listening to the expansion card, just remove it and the built-in 128MB of storage and the MP3s that you have put on it are accessible again.

Multi Media expansion cards go from small 16MB (which would add about 15 extra minutes of music to your Jukebox) up to 128MB, which would add up to about 4 hours of voice recording or 2 hours music storage to the unit. This really does make the Ondio a proper Jukebox. It's true to say that the Multi Media expansion cards don't allow you to store vast quantities of music, but, as time goes on the amount of storage space that you can fit on one of the Multi Media cards will almost certainly increase. There are many cards that are similar to the MMC. More details about the correct cards here

It is feasible that in a couple of years you could expand this Jukebox to holding 10GB worth of music and have it on this non-skip, jogging friendly FM radio included Jukebox. The Ondio may not suit everyone, but it's relatively inexpensive, it's fairly scaleable in terms of capacity (both now and for the future) and it comes with a lot of nice features.