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>> Hey, I'm Donald Bell, senior editor for digital audio and MP3. And today we're taking a first look at the Arcos [assumed spelling] 105 MP3 player. This is a two gigabyte flash-based MP3 player, made by a company, Arcos, that is mostly known for their high end portable video players. This has a one point eight inch OLED video screen, and it supports video playback, audio playback, and photos. But that's it. Usually a player of this size, we see an FM tuner, a voice recorder, a line input recorder. We don't see that on the Arcos 105. So what we like about the Arcos 105 is its price for one, it's around eighty nine dollars for a two gigabyte MP3 player with a one point eight inch screen. That's a pretty good price, given the screen size. We also like that it is constructed with a really hard anodized aluminum faceplate. The back of it is more of a standard plastic though, so that was a little bit of a surprise. We also like that it's Mac and PC compatible. Video playback was the big disappointment on this, especially coming from a company that does such a great job with portable video players. We were surprised that the video resolution on the Arcos 105 is about half of what you'd see on something like the new iPod Nano. Low frame rate, video playback. It still is okay, but it's just not what we'd expect from Arcos. Another thing we liked about the Arcos 105 is that it comes in three different colors, it comes in black, red, and silver, all at the same price, all at the same capacity. We wish there was a little bit more than the two gigabyte capacity option, especially for a MP3 player that touts itself as being video worthy. If you're gonna be putting a lot of video on here, you'd really want a MP3 player that has more than two gigabytes. Still a pretty good MP3 player, and it's one of the only MP3 players out there in this price range that can do an adequate job of displaying photos and videos.
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I'm Donald Bell, and that was a first look at the Arcos 105 MP3 player.
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