Mark Morgan points out that Archos has released the mother of all handheld devices, the Pocket Media Assistant 400. This thing does it all — and for a whopping $800, it better!
The PMA 400 features a 3.6″ LCD screen, a 30 gigabyte hard drive, music record/playing, video capture/playing, PDA functionality via Qtopia (the PMA 400 is Linux-based, and WiFi.
Mark notes that PCMag.Com gives the PMA 400 (they call it a 430 — not sure where the difference in numbering crops up) very high marks in its review, citing the extremely high prices as the main downside. PCMag says the screen looks great, the audio recording features are the best they’ve seen in a PDA-style device, and the Wi-Fi setup is straightforward. It is a disk-based machine, so some of the PDA functions are slower than you’d find with a flash-based PDA.
Still, an awesome idea. If it was $399 rather than $799, I’d probably buy one.