Product Review: Archos Safe
By The Crypto Monk
Archos is a small French company manufacturing electronic devices (tablets, smartphones, media players…). They launched an affordable hardware wallet, called Safe-T Mini, early 2018 for the price of 49.99€ or $57. Today we are reviewing it to see if it can challenge the biggest competitors (Trezor, Ledger, Keepkey…).
First impressions
The packaging looks very premium especially for something which is worth 50€. It is sealed with a sticker to guarantee it was not previously opened.
The box includes:
- wallet
- usb power cord
- ribbon
- protective cover
- user manuals
- 3 recovery notes
Set up the wallet
Setting up the wallet takes 4 quick steps fully described here.
Once you have succesfully installed the firmware, you have to disconnect the device and restart it before generating a new wallet or recovering an existing one.
Supported coins
Archos supports the list of coins above including all of ERC 20 tokens. It clearly offers less options than the most popular wallets on the market but it should be enough for most of people.
Recovering an existing wallet
I went through the whole process to recover a wallet and decided not to generate a new one. Some devices offer a bad user experience for that specific task so here is how to proceed with the Safe-T Mini.
All you have to do is to select “Recover Wallet” on the “starting procedure“.
Then you will be asked to confirm on the device.
All you have to do is to enter each word one by one and the way to do it is very secure. You start by selecting the first letter then an algo offers you more options as you enter more letters until your word appears as the solution.
Receiving funds / Sending funds
Plug in your wallet to your computer, open the app in your Chrome browser and choose the coin you would like to receive or send.
For this test, Ethereum was chosen and since the app doesn’t have a native Ethereum software integrated, you will have to access your ETH wallet through MyCrypto.
You will be asked to enter your pin and export the public key of your account.
Choose the right ETH address and open the interface. You can now see the address and receive or send funds. Unfortunately, the Safe-T doesn’t integrate any native interface. If you want to transfer other coins, you have to download and use Electrum wallet. 
The first thing to do before using Electrum is to generate a new wallet or recover an existing one. Since the interface is not very user friendly, it might be a bit tricky for beginners. So here is the full process explained step by step.
Conclusions
The Safe-T Mini is the cheapest hardware wallet i have tried so far. You can get one for 50€. It is quite easy to set up and well built.
On the other hand, it does not integrate any native interface supporting any coin so you will have to use MyCrypto and Electrum. This is not very practical especially for beginners. It is still a valid alternative to a paper wallet but since Archos is about to launch a new hardware wallet (Safe-T Touch), i would wait a little bit before choosing this option. Disclaimer : this article is not a partnership. I wanted to test and review a backup device and the team decided to customize it for me. More reviews of products will come in the future.
