julian67 wrote:
I'm intrigued at the concept of owning 6 Archos devices which all "work fine" being a cause for disgust at Archos. When people get a faulty device or receive poor after sales service (or both) they have a real grievance. When someone gets angry at everything working nicely maybe they only have an attitude?
Attitude? Sure. Why not. I have 6 Archos Android devices which are no longer supported. Two of them lost support 6 months after they were released! Another two lost support a year after release! No firmware updates, no bug fixes, nothing. And just because a product works fine doesn't mean there are no bugs that could be fixed or a desire to be updated so more CURRENT APPS would be COMPATIBLE. Not to mention tablets with the same exact name and model numbers but with totally different and incompatible firmware, firmware updates that wreaked havoc, etc., etc.
Archos is notorious for shoddy firmware and abandoning their product. Even if you're fortunate to have product of theirs that works ok you have to deal with them dropping it as though it never existed. I don't fancy spending 200 or 300 bones on an Android device and 6 to 9 months later or a year later they say "sorry, we're not dealing with that anymore". That's what you call "poor after sales service". This forum is, or was, full of people that gave them years of a loyal following but like me, finally gave up when we realized that, not only were they not going to change for the better in product and service, but they were actually getting worse. And you're right about the fact there are more alternatives out there now. WAY BETTER ALTERNATIVES. And who abandons their product like that? Who? Not even the lower end Coby and Vizio companies do that. My wife has a Vizio tablet that Vizio stop selling 2 years ago and the bloody thing still connects to the Vizio servers and does updates, two years after they stop selling the thing! That's what I call "after sales support"!
And if you think the sole or main reason for slow down here is because of the availability of alternatives you're delusional. All one has to do is spend an hour or so skimming over this entire forum to see there's an infinite number of complaints and disgusted users with non-stop issues, failures, destructive updates, bugs that never get addressed let alone fixed, almost zero "out-of-box working right" experience without having to do some work around-hacking-fixing, etc., etc., etc. I'm a member of several other product forums and have looked over dozens and dozens of others and I have NEVER seen the massive amount of complaints, issues and outright disgust at user experience and manufacturer lack of support that I've seen on this forum over the last 5 years. Never.
I hope that satisfies your "intrigue".