Hey, remember a month ago, when I asked all of my loyal and faithful readers to help me pick out a new mp3 player?   Yeah, I figured you didn’t.  Anyway, I went with the Archos 5, and it won out for three main reasons: it has a large hard drive capacity (I got the 120GB), it has a 5 inch touch screen, and most important of all, it allows you to record shows from your television onto your device (with the separate DVR adapter).

As you all know, I watch WAY too much TV, so the thought of being able to bring some of those shows with me to watch on my commute is something I was very excited about.

But I hit a snag, early on – the DVR function wasn’t working.

Well, it would record for a few seconds or minutes, but then freeze, and that would be that.  There were numerous “one last try” attempts, and none of them worked.  And that wasn’t all.  I could not for the life of me figure out how to make a playlist on the go with the thing.  In some message boards, I read that a new firmware was available with bug fixes, but every time I tried to update it, the unit told me it was already up to date, even though I knew it wasn’t.  I sat on hold with customer service, listening to some extra horrible kind of muzak, only to then get a recording that told me they were closed and disconnected me, despite the fact that I was well within their business  hours.  I was at my wits end, and was quite frankly about to return the thing.

Then I saw a note on a message board that said you could manually update the firmware by downloading the update onto your computer and then transferring it onto the device.  Not intuitive, but I gave it a whirl.  Then I tried to record another show.  And it worked.  I was afraid it was a fluke, so I did it with another show, and that worked too.  And then this morning, after watching a full episode of recent TV on my train in to work, I figured out how to make playlists on the thing.  The process doesn’t make much sense, and Archos gives you no directions anywhere on how to do it, but I got it, and that makes me happy.

I still have a few complaints, mainly that the volume on the video is a little low for my tastes, and the A/V sync was a little off, but at least now I have faith that they can fix bugs along the way with new firmware updates.

So, to paraphrase Madonna, I’ve made up my mind – I’m gonna keep* my Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet.

*Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind if it starts testing my patience again in the near future…