Phillips Go Gear - SA3115 / 97 Portable Media Player
I planned to gift a portable media player to my wife on this valentine day.
After little market search and product analysis, I decided to buy PhillipsGoGear
SA3115/97. It has a great look. It has appealing black color with 1.8" color
screen.
It has simple interface with keylock feature. keylock feature is very useful
when you intend to keep your player into pocket. It locks all the keys except
volume keys.
This Philips player has five keys on the front - 4 cursor keys and 1
multifunction key. These keys are placed in a circular keypad with soft touch.
The multifuction key at the center of keypad is a dual key for play|pause and
on|off functionality. Press it once for play|pause and press and hold for few
seconds for on|off functionality.
There is one key on the lefyhand side with an icon on lock. This is the
keylock key. One pair of keys are at right side. These are volume keys - for V+
and V-.
Below is a chart of common features of this media player:
Memory
Type : Flash
Capacity: 1GB
Expended
Memory: not supported
Display
Coloured display with 1.8 inches screen.
Resolution: 160 x 128
Audio
Supports MP3 and WMA format.
Equalizer: 7 mode
(Off | Rock | Funk | Jaaz | classic | hip-hopp | Dance.
Sound Quality: Above
average however there is no question of comparing it with Apple iPod. iPod is
much better than this. (well, one of the factor in my decision of buying this
was money also.)
Video
Supports only WMA format. Additional support for
3gp format would be great.
Radio
Has FM receiver in built. You can set and save 10
channels.
Pictures:
Supports JPEG and BMP format. It comes with an
media convertor utility which resizes and convert JPEG images to BMP images.
Although the player can display JPEG images, very large images gets distorted. I
copied my Siny Digital Camera (12 megapixels) images to the player without
convertor utility. It took too longer to display and the displayed image was
havily distorted. Then I used convertor utility which reduce the size of images
to nearly 57 KB but the display was better.
Battery and Charging
Phillips GoGear has inbuilt lithium
ion battery. This can only be charged through USB port of myour laptop or
desktop. Or you can use an stand-alone USB charger, if you don't have PC.
Lacking Features:
- Support for 3gp video format.
- Browse music by location. Currently you can browse music artist | album |
Genere only. You can choose all songs as well but in that case songs are played
in alphabatical order.
- Support for multiple playlist.
- Functionality to play all songs of an artist. Currently you have to choose
artist and then its album. Once it has played all songs of that album and artist
combination, you can set to repeat or repeat and shuffle within that album. It
would be better if the player software automatically jump to next album of the
same singer or to next singer.
- You can not listen music or viw video or photo while it is connected to
computer. This is irritating as it needs to kep connecting for hours for
charging.
- USB changer should be bundeld with the packet.
Great Features:
You can upgrade the firmware. It comes
with a device manager that you install on your computer. Device manager check
for the update avaible on Philips website and automatically updates the
firmaware.
However, I could not use these feature. My players firmware version is 2.56
and the latest version available on the website is 3.7. When I used devide
manager to upgrade, it told me that my player has most updated version. I tried
several times, but it keeps on giving the same message. finally I got frustrated
and gave up.