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Physical Controls (6.25)
 The only physical buttons on the Archos 7 are the power button and the volume buttons. They are located on the top of the device, towards the right-hand side. All three buttons are slightly raised and have an engraved symbol. The symbols are mainly aesthetic, however, since they aren't pronounced enough to provide your fingertips with enough information as to their whereabouts. In terms of play (tactile feedback from pressing the button) and travel (the depth to which you have to press the button to activate it), the keys were fine. They could've used a bit more snap to them, but since you aren't going to be using either of them to control anything particularly precise, these issues are negligible.
The (approximately) 7-inch touchscreen is what you'll be using to interact with the device. The touchscreen is pressure-sensitive, which means it won't feel nearly as responsive as the iPod Touch's screen (we generally prefer capacitive touchscreens to resistive). The other concern is the size of the device iteself. Hitting touch-areas in the center of the screen is often awkward and requires hand repositioning. The device is big, heavy, and borderline unwieldy. If you put an Archos 7 in the hands of famed concert pianiast Oksana Kolesnikova, she'd appear to have the alacrity of a newborn.
The hands pictured in this photo are average, maybe slightly larger than average. The device is large.
Display
Screen resolution (12.39)
The Archos 7's screen boasts a resolution of 800 by 480, which rivals lower-end computer monitors. Such an absurdly high resolution carries with it the potential for a great amount of detail.
Screen size (17.19)
Although the stated 7 inches is a bit optimistic, the Archos 7 still has the biggest screen out of any media player we've reviewed to date. The only reason you'd have to squint at this screen is if you have a pre-existing vision problem, in which case we urge you to look for a nearby optometrist before reading any more media player reviews.
Pixels per inch (5.43)
The giant screen size and high resolution only averages out to about 135.70 pixels per inch, which is about average. Pixel density can dictate the sharpness of lines or vibrancy of color. While you shouldn't have any issues on the Archos 7, we did think it was interesting that the Archos 5 and Archos 7 had the same resolutions despite having vastly differently-sized screens. Although it's a bit smaller, the Archos 5 will appear to have a slightly sharper picture than the Archos 7.
Screen brightness (5.60)
There are two levels of backlight intensity (in addition to "off"): dim and bright. In addition, there's a brightness slider that ups the display's brightness levels. Although this doesn't necessarily up the screen's luminosity, it can make colors look somewhat less murky.
We clocked the Archos 7's brightness at 339.73 candelas per square meter. This is very bright for a media player, and the giant surface area outputting the light should mean the Archos 7 could double as a lamp.
Built-in Speakers (7.56)
The Archos 7's built-in speakers were capable of outputting 92.2 decibels. First of all, most media players don't even have speakers. Secondly, which is pretty good for a portable media player. Most media players out there don't have any built-in speakers.
Cable Connectivity (4.50)
The Archos 7 has a proprietary port on its underside that will let it connect to myriad add-ons (GPS, DVR, etc.), but also serves as its USB port. We don't award points for proprietary connectors, unfortunately, because they're a pain to replace. If you lose a device's MiniUSB cable, chances are you have 12 other ones lying around. however, since they usually limit you to accessories sold by the device manufacturer, and almost always at a premium price.
The Archos 5 does at least have a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, widening your options well beyond the stereo headset that comes in the box with the device. This is an area where we particularly don't like proprietary connectors since the headphones that are included with most multimedia devices are far inferior than those that can be purchased separately.
Internal Storage (13.02)
The model of Archos 7 we reviewed has a manufacturer-stated capacity of 160GB. Once you convert that number to actual Gigabytes (typically on a specs sheet, 1 GB refers to 1 billion bytes, as opposed to 1,073,741,824 bytes) it turns out that the Archos 7 has 148GB of memory. Percentage-wise, this isn't a huge drop, but just know you're getting 12GB less capacity than advertised.
External Storage (0.0)
The Archos 7 doesn't have any slots for external storage.
Battery Life (7.14)
We're still conducting our battery tests, because the Archos 7 is being a big baby and keeps conking out some time in the middle of the night even though its batteries aren't dead yet. We'll update this section as soon as we can get some reliable results from the finnicky thing.
UPDATE: We just got the music battery test to finish to completion, and wow... when 1/2 of the backside of a device is battery, it has remarkable longevity. The Archos 7 was able to play music back, at max volume, nonstop for 42 hours and 37 minutes. This is a really, really long time, by far our longest result for music playback. We're in the process of testing video and wifi connectivity at the moment, so check back in a few days for another update.
UPDATE AGAIN: We got test results for both video playback and wifi connectivity. The Archos 7 managed to last 5 hours, 6 minutes on our video test and 4 hours, 23 minutes on our wifi test. Both of these times are average.
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