Echostar, remember them? Well they are still around and kicking up a storm. Take the news of them buying into Archos for instance. To me this shows that they are getting themselves into a position of growth. If they play their cards right it could actually give them a tidy little advantage over their competition.

Okay fine, their portable media players are not exactly the best looking products on the market. And they are not the ones with best user interface. But you can’t deny that Archos, does know how to jump ahead of the technology curve. One of the first few to offer hard drive based MP3 players, and more recently, the portable video players/recorders, the company has come up with a fancy new portable DVR, they call AV 700 which resembles the old Newton in size and shape. It works with all sorts of video formats like Divx, MPEG4 and Windows Media, even though it is a linux-based device, with a nice 7 inch screen. It can record television shows with nary a computer in sight. [Read the rest]