It's a creekmore world » Video

Travel Gear Review: Archos 7 portable media player

David — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:00:29 +0000

I wouldn’t start a long trip without the Archos 7. The Archos 7 is a PVP – personal video player, designed to display TV and movies on the road. It’s made extended travel a breeze for the kids. They handled long car rides in Morocco with ease watching High School Musical 3 over and over and over. And I love it too. I actually look forward to my frequent cross-country flights because I can catch-up on great movies.

I’ve had it for about 6 months and it’s been used for hundreds of hours. Like everything I ‘review’, I actually use it a lot. Why is is great? It simply does what a video player should: provide a beautiful video image and run with a very long battery life.

Archos 7 with an iPhone

The screen is large and clear – about 7 inches diagonal. iPhones suffer from being too small to watch comfortably for hours. Laptops screens are usually too large for the video quality and it makes video look grainy.

More importantly, both phones and laptops run out of batteries very quickly. I can watch 6 or 7 hours of video on the Archos 7 and twice that with the duplicate battery. And it stores, potentially, over a hundred normal length movies and still have space left for your music collection. Content can come from a DVR ‘docking’ station where you record whatever is showing on your TV. I think you can do rentals from Amazon, although I’m not sure. We have a big DVD collection so that’s what we use.

The internet wi-fi features were rarely useful to me, but it can double as a portable web browser with built-in support for hotmail, gmail and yahoo email. It will store documents and pictures. I did use it as a backup for photos on our Middle East month-long trip.

It’s heavy at 1.5 lbs so you won’t be carrying it in a pocket. And it’s not cheap at around $400. I wish it would play videos over 2GB, but it’s not a serious problem because it’s easy to get a 2 hour high-quality movie under that size. It did take several tries and some research to figure out how to get movies into the right format on the device. It’s not as easy as buying a video from itunes and having it automatically download.

The Archos 7 is an opinion-polarizing device for consumers. Half the Amazon reviews are 5-star and half are 1-star. It apparently doesn’t do nearly the number of things the manufacturer says it should do. So do your research first if you need something specific. I use it as a video player only, and for that it’s fantastic. But frustrated users, promised more than they were delivered, abound.

The only add-ons I recommend are a leather case, a spare battery, and a y-splitter so both kids can watch/listen.

Sahara Desert Trek Part 1

Trisha — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:08:18 +0000

So I work backward. I know it. You know it. Let’s not dicuss it anymore. kthxbai.

Shot with Flip HD camera. Edited by Trisha.

Video: Jordan Valley Pool and Dead Sea

David — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:47:35 +0000

Here is a video from our first few days at the resort in Jordan. The original blog is here.

Video: Sometimes the best places are close to home.

David — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:34:17 +0000

We spent the day along the Potomac hiking the upper section of the Billy Goat trail. This would have counted as an amazing hike if it had been Peru, Mozambique or Cambodia.

But it’s in our backyard. Go Maryland!

Made with Flip Video HD and Adobe Premiere Elements.

Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt: Days 17,18 and 19

David — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:32:23 +0000

Getting to Sharm el-Sheikh is effortless. It’s a 45-minunte flight on Egypt Air. Sharm, as it’s known, is a resort town that has expanded rapidly since being returned to the Egyptians in 1982. Tourism is the only remaining industry after strong environmental conservation laws have nearly eliminated the shipping trade on which it once thrived. The proximity to Europe and South Asia, reasonable prices, long strips of beach, dry weather, amazing coral reefs and underwater sea life are making Sharm an international destination. Here we see the most diverse crowds on our trip. And the sea life is equally diverse. It’s very, very impressive.

Sharm is also famous for hosting major international summits and peace treaties, most famously the return of Gaza to Palestinian rule. The India and Pakistan delegations had another fizzled attempt at negotiation here last month. Just this weekend the Vice President of Iraq is at our resort and security at the Hyatt front gate is strict.

The check-in takes awhile as I sort out some confusion with our reservations (naturally, the price is higher than I was promised). But by 2 p.m. we are in the pool and ordering french fries and large bottles of water. We very quickly discover that this is a great resort. Our room has a sea view close enough to hear the gentle Red Sea waves crash ashore.

Lily holds her nose AND eyes on impact.

There are five pools terraced from the main building down toward the beach with plenty of shade. It has the largest hotel water slide we have ever seen! Seriously, it’s kinda dangerous and wouldn’t last a minute in the States. The temperature is about 95, but with all the cooling water, one hardly notices. And it’s super-dry for the seaside. It’s easy to stay out in the sun… and we do. All of us get slightly burned even though we reapplied SPF 30 every four hours.

Super slide carnage

On Saturday, the kids run straight for the water slide. Having overcome any fear the day before, we start doing stunts. We all swallow gallons of pool water. Lily scrapes herself up kneeling down the slide. Emma’s head gets crunched between my shoulder and Trisha’s cheekbone in a pile-up (She has a hard head. Trish and I were the injured ones.) Lily gets tumbled to the bottom once and surfaces in a screaming panic. She has the mechanics to swim but still has a lot of fear, so we need to stay close to her.

Passed out in the shade

Eventually, we get mildly scolded by the staff, who only intermittently monitor the slide. Apparently, we aren’t supposed to go down the slide four at a time. Ha ha, not a problem. We don’t make trouble. So we head to the lazy river. I buy the girls an orange pool raft and they play ‘Capsize the Pirate’ for hours. Sleep comes effortlessly.

On Sunday we hit the ample, but uninspired breakfast buffet and walk down to the beach for Emma’s first real snorkeling adventure. She did some shallow reef stuff with Trisha the day before and today I get the privilege of taking her over the wall.

Emma and Mom snorkel the shallows at the Hyatt.

The reef here is exceptional. Trisha and I have a few hundred scuba dives between us, and this Hyatt Resort house reef is top quality. There is a mini-wall – a drop-off of about 40 feet — 50 yards off the beach. It teems with schools of colorful fish that are similar to their cousins in the Caribbean, but noticeably different. The Red Sea is very salty because it gets limited inflow of water from the Indian Ocean, so it’s easy to float on top (not like the dead sea, but easy).

Emma and David get ready to snorkel the Hyatt house reef wall.

Emma is excited by the fish, but the salty water and poorly-fitting scuba mask make our swim pretty short. She tries again in the afternoon, and comes back even sooner. She’s a little discouraged, but I think she will be a diver like her parents. Trisha and I, on the other hand, alternate long swims all day — one person with the kids and one out snorkeling the reef. By the end of the day I’ve been out enough that my body retains the pleasant feeling of ocean sway. Lily spends her time making sand castles with me at the water’s edge and watching nervously for fish, which she fears.

Lily plays in the Red Sea.

Dinner is simple, good and not outrageously priced for a resort. It’s nice to be here in the off season because we got a great room (actually two connected rooms) for about $250 a night total. And there aren’t that many guests. We love it. Even with only two and a half days here, we feel very rejuvenated, . This weekend is definitely something we needed to get through this journey. Sharm, and specifically the Hyatt, is a place to consider if you can swing the time change and airfare. We plan on returning and doing some scuba, maybe when Emma is old enough to dive.

Over afternoon ice cream, (Swiss Movenpick, of course. The only ice cream in Egypt) Emma and I discuss our upcoming itinerary. We have a few days in Cairo and then a week in Morocco left. She comments that the first stop on our trip, the Dead Sea in Jordan, seems soooo distant, even though it was just two weeks ago. “Yep,” I say, “travelling slows time down.” That makes her wonder if we could live forever if we just kept travelling. She might be on to something.

[Photos by Trisha Creekmore]