Archos has produced some fascinating products of late, such as the 404 Camcorder, and the Archos 604 WiFi. But with its 7in, 800 x 480 touchscreen, 40GB hard disk and Unix-based operating system, the 704 WiFi is edging into the territory of UMPCs like Sony’s UX27GN.

It isn’t as versatile though: the operating system, although Unix-based, is locked down. So while there might be an enthusiastic community awaiting such products, it’s unlikely that there’ll be much third-party software for the 704, in spite of it being a t choice for applications like GPS. It’s also not a device you’ll get much creative work done on – there’s a PDF reader but no way to open Microsoft Word documents, for instance.

But it still has plenty of attractions for the traveller, as it’s compatible with a huge range of video, audio and image files. The battery might only weigh 144g, but it proved ample in our tests. Playing back a succession of film-length AVI files encoded with DiVX produced an impressive 5hr 31m battery life. Playing audio files was equally impressive: it lasted nearly 24hrs.

The touchscreen is a mixed success. Prodding your way through the well-designed menu system, you’ll see it deforms a little more than we’d like, with the icons becoming discoloured under your finger. There’s no stylus, meaning fingernails are the best control method – we had little joy using the pad of a finger. The screen itself is reasonably sharp, and images appear vibrant and detailed.

We appreciate the USB-in port, which allows you to plug in mass storage devices such as portable hard disks and digital cameras to either directly view or copy content across bi-directionally. It’s a great way of backing up from a camera without needing a PC.

Wi-Fi comes from an internal 802.11b/g transceiver, and there’s a mobile version of Opera built in. Web browsing is simple, and you can move around websites by dragging your finger around the page, but text entry is tricky: navigating to entirely new URLs is a difficult process. It behaves as a PC on a network too: you can stream media to and from other PCs.

The 704 WiFi is very niche: it won’t replace your laptop, but as a way of watching video on the move it offers good battery life, as well as being a nifty way of surfing the net away from your main PC.