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 playpause and onoff functionality. Press it once for playpause and press and hold for few seconds for onoff 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 device 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.
Any suggestion, how can I upgrade the firmware to latest version?
Related Links:
Phillips Go Gear SA-31 Media Player - Repairing Firmware
1 comments:
Compact Philips GoGear SA31 players is for people who are more focused on music but still enjoy watching video and photos on the move.
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