Tech Mania: Archos 18B Vision

17 February 2013

Archos 18B Vision - Review

The 18B Vision is a slim pocketable MP3/MP4 player from a french gadget company Archos. If you wanna know more about Archos.., its a small company making MP3 players, Tablets and more at budget. It is exclusively imported by Flipkart(yea.. the online megastore :p) in India. The player costs about Rs. 1911 in their site. Its a 8GB device without any expansion support.

Looks: It looks nice.. and maybe everyone has their own taste. On front, we have 1.8 inch display, Volume up and down keys, Next/Previous keys, OK, Menu and back keys.It sports a 3.5mm audio jack and a mini USB port on either sides. Backside, we have brand names, model nos., warnings and a Reset button. The unit is very slim with 8.5mm and weighs only 28g..

Live Pictures

Performance/UI: You've to press and hold the OK button in order to switch on the device.. It has 7 icons that are vertically scrollable: Music, Video, Photo, Radio, Files, Recorder, Settings.. Lets check the Music first for what its meant to be. The music player can play MP3, FLAC, WAV and APE file formats. It can sort them in all ways as we want: All songs, Artist, Album, Genre.. and also in Files view. It has some sample musics and the quality of sound is good. It can also view lyrics of the song if it has ".lrc" file(you can make it yourself for your songs). The screen can be locked while music playback. Volume is audible at 20 and goes up to 30. Lets move on to Video section.. It supports MP4 and AVI format.. Video playback is average. Its not a wise thing to view long videos on a 1.8 inch screen. Photo, its the same as video. But its okay. Radio is for only Chinese, European, Japanese and American regions. Yea, we can't use FM in India. Hence its a useless feature.. The voice recorder works pretty well and overall the player is a good choice for thoseewho want a audio player with a display.