Buggy
Unfortunately there have been numerous postings on the gadget forums about the buggyness of these. Constant crashes and reboots and frequent hard resets (i.e. you lose everything) required. Even Amazon pulled the sale of these for a while. That is just unheard of.
Archos has released 4 firmware updates in the short time since release. This not what you need, especially as you lose your apps etc as part of the upgrade process. Their support team is not being very sympathetic either. People are getting emails like "We are working on a fix, wait for the next firmware". No apologies.
The same happened with the 5. It went out very buggy and 8 months later there are still issues that have not been fixed (DVR audio sync, back to back recording, truncated recording, clock drift etc). As Neil says, Archos quickly drop any support for the previous device after the new one is released. You are left with bugs and no hope of a fix.
It is worrying that it is becoming the norm for companies to release beta products and expect the consumer to simply put up with it.
Archos seem to be using their paying customers to try out and debug their Android concept for them. They clearly hope that if it is shiny enough then people will put up with it. Wrong.
Also, these things are in real short supply. Worse still, people with failed units are being told they will have to wait a month for a replacement. Just not good enough.
This is all a real shame. Archos used to be a by word for quality, if expensive, products. Unfortunately they have now blown their reputation out of the window. Now they are just expensive.