I really appreciate you taking the time to visit our boards just to help me out on this. Due to your comments I think I may wait a while on this, but I still think I may try it out. If I do I'll definitely order from somewhere with a good return policy I was planning on going through Newegg anyway. I'd like to comment on your points, most of which I'm not too suprised to hear, unfortunately:

- Still weighs a lot (like the old ones)

This was never something I was very concerned about, but a decent point to make. I'm more worried about the heat it might create, which I've read can be a good amount.

- Very buggy with mp3, and doesn't work with wma with the latest firmware.

The MP3 part is something to worry about. I don't really count WMA absence as a check against it, becaue they don't advertise it as such, and I don't have any media in the format anyway.

- video is dubious - doesn't fare well with divX, xVID, avi...

This is the hardest part about owning these early devices. Hell, codecs in general are what I like least about computers over anything else. I do a lot of video conversion, and it's a serious PITA. The only thing that somewhat negates this point for me is that converting videos to anything else would take far longer than a simple analog export to the video recorder in the unit. I assume the unit will play videos it recorded its self. At least I hope so! How was the recording process for you?

- Screen is not recessed and therefore VERY susceptible to scratching

That's a good point. It's hard to get a good idea of how the screen is placed from pictures online. I take good care of my devices, but I'd be worried about this.

- Crashes a lot.

There we go. That's what I was expecting to hear. Archos needs to hire some real programmers, because I can't believe they release such shoddy software. The one thing that might help is the open source project for the device, but It's not the firmware, just the OS, so I don't know if the bugs would all be worked out, but I want to keep an eye on it.

- Batteries don't last long enough to watch a film...

This is odd. I've been seeing a whole range of results from people. Some say they're getting pretty close to the rated length, others say it's much shorter. Last Samurai is pretty long, but most places I see are saying around 3 hours for the batteries. If I ordered the product and found it wasn't getting long enough battery life, and I liked it enough to give it a shot, I'd try replacing them with one of these. I read the tests they did on them and they seem to know what they're talking about.

Don't get me wrong, I've taken your opinions to heart, and I've been somewhat turned off of the product, but I'm still curious. Besides, I would really like a product like this, and all the other companies that seem to be working on this are coming out with theirs in around a year from now, and/or are running WinCE on it or something similar. Also, that TAZ 1 device doesn't really appeal all that much to me. It doesn't seem very portable, and also doesn't appear to have video recording functionality. It's an interesting device, but not quite what I'm looking for.