Archos Diamond Omega review

Image Gallery

The image gallery is pretty straightforward. You get a Photos tab with a timeline of all your shots and an Albums one, for organizing things. Interestingly enough, the Cloud tab, we saw on the original Nubia Z17 is missing from the Archos. It appears the Nubia partnership didn't manage to procure access to the Nubia Cloud. While somewhat of a bummer, let's be realistic here, Google Photos is pre-installed and taking care of all that and sprinkling some AI magic in the background.

Simple gallery

The gallery has some fun editing options. English translations also seem improved over the original Z17 - a nice trend we have been noticing all throughout the UI.

Gallery editing options

There are even some fairly advanced-level corrections you can make on your images.

Fine level corrections

Music player

The Nubia Music player features a really polished UI. There are plenty of search and sorting interfaces to explore. Perhaps even a few too many. It will also automatically look for lyrics to display while playing the track, though it failed to find the words to some very popular tracks.

Music player looks great

Some of the automatic sorting and organization algorithms misbehave as well. Some tracks don't end up in the same artist category, despite having all their ID3 tags and getting properly placed within the same album. Automatic artwork download is also dodgy.

Automatic filtering is hit and miss

Just like the image gallery, the music player, included with the Archos lacks access to Nubia's cloud music service. Granted, we had quite a few issues while trying to actually use it on the Nubia Z17, mostly of regional nature. It's not a major loss, but still worth mentioning.

While on the topic of music, one less noticeable, "under-the-hood" upgrade the Archos Diamond Omega and Z17s feature, over their Nubia Z17 predecessor is an even higher-quality DAC. The older 24-bit/192kHz has been replaced by a 32-bit/384kHz unit. It sounds really crisp and almost makes up for the Type-C dongle, we were forced to use.

Another thing worth noting is that the Dolby ATMOS equalizer is gone this time around. Instead, the Archos Diamond Omega boasts a DTS-HD audio branding.

Video Player

The Archos Diamond Omega comes with a surprisingly capable video player pre-loaded. It appears to be the exact same app, we found on the original Z17, so it is courtesy of the Nubia development team as well. Interestingly enough, however, it does not have a separate icon of its own, but can only be triggered through a file browser or download manager, by clicking on a video.

Videos up to 4K resolution are supported with the AVC (H.264) codec, HEVC (H.256) also works. AC3 is also supported to some extent, but 640 kbps seem to be about as much as it can handle.

Nubia video player

The app is even nice enough to let you toggle between hardware and software video decoding, just in case the Snapdragon 835 fails to handle some more exotic format on a native low level and needs the powerful CPU cores to pick up some of the slack instead.

Oddly enough, Nubia still hasn't included subtitle support. You can, however view the video in a small floating window.

Another interesting fact we can't overlook, is that Archos decided to leave the Nubia player on the Diamond Omega, instead of bundling its own excellent solution. The Archos video player is not exactly popular, in pure number terms, but we have found it to be one of the best Android video platforms out there. It is available on the Play Store, but we still feel like Archos could have easily thrown in the paid version for free on the phone. There are plenty of nifty scraping and content management features to enjoy there, not to mention extensive format support.

Nubia Browser

Despite having the Chrome browser pre-loaded, the Archos Diamond Omega also includes a custom Nubia solution. Since it is the default browser, we used it in our battery endurance tests - a task it handled pretty well.

The app itself is a less feature-rich, but definitely better translated variant of the one we found running on the original Nubia Z17 review unit. Its interface reminds us something along the lines of past version of UC Browser or Dolphin, but we can't quite put our finger on it.

Nubia browser

Regardless of what core it is based on, the Nubia browser looks to be working well. Plus, on the Archos, it exhibited no odd redirecting behaviour, which was a big concern on the Chinese Nubia Z17.

As for advanced features, certain things, like Ad Block are clearly missing in this version, but you can still disable images, toggle night mode or change the default font.

Nubia browser options

Audio output has its ups and downs

The Archos Diamond Omega did very well in the first part of our audio quality test. When working with an active external amplifier it produced impressively nicely loud output and had impeccable accuracy.

Sadly, things weren't as impressive when headphones come into play as intermodulation distortion and stereo crosstalk increased notably, while volume dropped to just above average. Frequency response was no longer perfect too, so not a performance worth writing home about really.

Archos Diamond Omega frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.