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Well I've spent the morning with my Eken.
First off, despite advertising a microphone port, there doesn't appear to be one. Not that big a deal for me.
Nearly all apps but Aldiko oriented correctly. I'm more app to lay the blame for the orientation issue on Aldiko not implementing the common fix for this issue in their code, like most other app developers have.
Battery life is awful. And the wireless is weak and somewhat problematic at times. I've had to shut the wireless off and turn it back on to get it to reconnect at times. And it has a very very limited range, they must be using a very low power wireless device, or have the device's power set to a very low setting. I took the device to the nearby McD's and had issues getting connected and staying connected to their free wifi, but even at home it had intermittent problems (I have a high gain antenna on my home wifi, giving strong signal coverage all throughout my place).
There were intermittent issues having it plugged into the computer via USD and plugged into power at the same time. The USB would drop and reconnect repeatedly. Removing the power plug and reconnecting the USB would resolve the issue.
Not that I was expecting much in this regard, but video playback is virtually non-existent. I put re-encoded videos set to the proper formats and to low bit rates, and all it would display is the opening screen, while the audio continued. The video frame never updated on any video I attempted to play.
Photo display and browsing worked great, and in fact this is one area it shines in. I could see my mother using this to carrying around her photo collection to show off (and in fact that may end up being what this device gets purposed for).
Despite reports from others, the Archos 5 android marketplace app won't install for me. This was disappointing, I didnt care much for the built in email client and browser and was hoping to get the Google apps installed. I was able to get a handful of 3rd party markets to install, however.
The screen brightness is not consistent and shows greying along the edges when viewing ebooks and under other applications that use a white background.
The touchscreen isn't bad, I've played with worse, and I've played with better.
The built in speaker may as well not exist. Plugged into headphones or to external powered speakers the audio was decent.
When playing music the sound was a bit more "tinny" than the same music played on even my generic coby mp3 player with the same headphones. Not bad, and I imagine a music player with some control over bass/treble output would produce better results. But it played all the music I threw at it. But as I said before, even with the volume turned up to max, the internal speaker barely audible.
Despite the advertised 2GB internal storage, the device is incapable of doing much of anything without adding an SD card. I had a spare 16GB card SDHC card, and it recognized it and worked with it perfectly. No reason to doubt its claims of working with up to 32GB size cards.
After spending a few hours with it, I'm am sticking to my pre-impressions, that it may be a decent device for around the home, but its shortcomings restrict it from being too much more than that. FBReader and Aldiko worked well, so for a home based ereader, where running it plugged in wouldn't be too big an issue, I would give it a passing grade. The built in PDF to Go app did an ok job of loading most of the PDFs I threw at it, some in a more responsive manner than others (as expected the more graphics included, and/or the higher resolution of the graphics, had a huge effect here).
Do I regret buying it? No, the price point made it a decent buy even if in the end it ends up being a glorified digital photo frame. I got mine for under $100 delivered, however. Being a fairly price sensitive consumer of electronic devices, even $25-$50 more would have put me into the regret category, I must say.
I do need to find screen protectors that fit it. I've heard that the screen doesn't hold up to much scratch resistance. Also if anyone has found any decent cases that fit it, I'd appreciate any links.
I must say after playing with this I am looking forward to the May 17th ship date of the Archos 7 Home Tablet, and even more so to the late summer release of the Cruz Tablet with Android 2.1.
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