Thanks to USB2, getting music on this device is easy. I used to move music with USB 1.1, and filling anything took hours. This thing takes minutes. You just treat it like File Explorer. If you organize music by album, move albums, or the whole collection. From here, the player will break down artists, songs, and albums. Of course, 20 gigs is a lot of music, so doing this is cumbersome. The interface has 11 lines of display. You see a lot of information. It still seems a little cumbersome, so I tried to get a mininum number of folder in the parent directory. None of this matters as long as you know what you want to do.

This unit is small, high capacity, and efficient. You can move files from a digital camera to this unit. It's easy, but a little slow. If you don't use CF cards, you have to buy an adapter on the 'bay or from Archos. This is great because these dumb memory cards are expensive, and every year they make the old ones obsolete. Buy one with enough capacity, and carry something like this.

This unit has a recorder. I expected nothing from this feature, but it actually works very well. I set it up to record MP3 at 192 kbps, the highest. I then plugged the funky two pronged adapter into the unit, and the miniplug output from my XM into that adapter. The music sounded very good. I can't say if it is as good as a PC based recorder, but there was nothing obviously wrong. So you could lug this along and make recordings of cassettes or LP, or record live broadcasts, etc. It's very painless. This may be the strongest feature, but I haven't played with it enough.

So, play music, record music, manipulate files, transfer pictures on a long trip. This is not as elegant as iPod, but this is utility taken to a high order of perfection. I hope it holds up. I have one of the original Archos Jukes, and it still works.

Apparently they give you the full version of MusicMatch with this unit. I've had the limited version with a computer I bought. The two seem to work well together. The MM goes through and sorts the music and updates a file on the player.

Because of the large screen, it is very easy to make playlists on the Gmini. You bring up an album on one side, and the playlist is on the other. I'm not sure how you do more serious navigation. The thing even has a screen keyboard to title recordings and playlists. It's slow but heck, it really works.

I'm stopping at 4 stars because the unit has hung up. You have to reset it, by holding down the power switch. It's not much worse than my Pocket PC, but I'm not sure what it means.

I'm going on vacation halfway around the world and wanted a way to store digital photos without lugging a laptop. Despite the negative reviews on this site, I decided to try the Gmini 220 because it was the only reasobnably priced, small device with 20 GB of storage and a built in CF card reader.

I've tested photo storage using the CF reader and it works great, and I've also come to love the MP3 player. The sound is great (I bought a $15 pair of headphones to replace the earbuds that came with the player). After loading over 200 CD's using the enhanced MP3 format from the MusicMatch software, I still have 15 GB free to store my photos. Now I have entertainment for that long plane ride as well as the photo storage I wanted!

The Gmini is small (easily fits in a shirt pocket) and well designed. The interface is intuitive, and gives you several ways to access music or data on the drive, including a straightforward browser.

After many hours of use, I've only had one problem: When I first got the player, I couldn't get the ArcLibrary to update after loading new music. You can use the browser instead of the ArcLibary, but I wanted everything to work as designed, so I called Archos technical support. They answered promptly, were courteous, and walked me through solving the problem in a few minutes (I had a corrupt ArcLibrary file - they had me delete the file and update the player, and the Gmini automatically recreated a working ArcLibrary file). This problem has not recurred and everything else has worked well.

I wonder if the people who are flaming the player here have read the manual - e.g. - the person whose Gmini froze. The manual's troubleshooting section identifies this as a possible outcome of subjecting the player to electrostatic shock and says to hold the power button down for 15 sections to shut off and reboot the system if this happens. The person complaining here talked about pushing all the buttons and now waiting for the battery to die - he doesn't mention tryintg the solution easily found in the manual (hmm - operator error?)!

Anyway, I'm very pleased with the Gmini 220 - very small size; huge storage capacity; very good sound quality; felxible, intuitive interface; versatile (self powered external hard drive, photo storage direct from CF card); good technical support.

Good (and make sure to read the Bad also):

0. Plays both WMA and MP3 files. I have a lot of WMAs and the iPod and older Archos were no good for me.

1. External hard drive for PC and Mac fast USB 2.0, no extra drivers needed! Plug and play, drag and drop whatever you want, it's that simple! Beats the Zen and others in this category. Unlike regular external drives, this one is self-powered because it has a battery - you just need to bring the USB cable to a friend's PC and you're in business.

2. You can browse and play music based on directory structure. Thank you Archos for not thinking users are morons and can't organise their music! This is the only hardware player that has this feature, much like Winamp on the PC. I hate the players that parse your MP3 tags and organize songs by artist etc - because most of the time the tags are missing or wrong, who knows who ripped that MP3... Of course, the Archos can *also* parse the tags and organise your music according to genre, artist, etc, like any other player :)

3. Rich and powerful UI. It is not quite as simple as that of most other players. However, you get clock, equalizer, volume, time remaining, track data, and what not on the same screen. The display itself if big and easy to read.

4. Sound quality is very good, perhaps better than the other players I tried. The default headphones are not bad - they have a volume control, which is nice. Use the equalizer to fine tune the sound. I love the way it pumps out my techno, and it passes the U2 test with flying colors :)

5. Built-in Compact Flash card reader and microphone. You need to load (buy?) extra software to use them. Nice add-ons that other players don't have. I can imagine backing up my camera after it fills up while on vacation, or recording a meeting at work.

6. Looks good :) Price + features + usability is very competitive - beats everything IMHO.

Bad:

0. It just froze on me 1 hr ago and there is nothing I can do. No combination of buttons, USB on/off, power, nothing!!! The screen is completely frozen at the instant when it was playing an MP3. Hopefully the battery will drain itself so I can reboot and salvage my files?

1. Even before the freezing problem, I noticed that the unit sometimes stops playing and displays a dialog File bla is not supported or cannot be played or something like that. I do not recall having such files. Unfortunately, the screen is too small to see the whole name of the file and its extension. I thought of this as a minor annoyance until the unit froze completely.

Bottom line: I've used all major hard disk MP3 players for extended periods, with the exception of the overpriced iPod. Not a single one is ready for prime time - in fact all were disapointments in usability and stability. This will be my last MP3 jukebox.

unwarranted criticism?

(5 out of 5) by bill ding on Dec 21, 2004 (currently in the Northern Hemisphere)

Good in more ways than one

(4 out of 5) by Amazon Customer on Nov 1, 2003