Grab it While You Can!! (Philips GoGear SA3225 2 GB)

Member Name: DavyMichelle

Product:	Philips GoGear SA3225 2 GB
Date:	27/06/09 (147 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazing Price, Easy to Use, Great Functions

Disadvantages: Videos Take a While, Small Storage Capabilities

There are loads of MP3 players with video capabilities out there that are much better than this one is, simply because they have a much high storage capacity. But the beauty of buying this little 2gb one is that the new 16gb players have convinced people that a tiny one like this isn't worth having. So you can get this from places in their clearance sections for as little as £10 now! £15 - £25 is a more realistic price to look for though, I personally paid £12.50 for mine. 2gb isn't a lot of storage, but it's all I need for my personal use, though I might decide I want more storage as time goes by. For now, this is ideal for me. I've got several hundred songs on here, as well as about 50 photos and 6 ten minute videos - with lots of space still available to use.

When you first get this, it's really easy to set up and get it charging. There's a USB lead included so you plug it into your computer to charge it up. Initially, it needs charging for five hours, but thereafter you can charge it for four hours to get 100% charge, or two hours to get 80% charge. You can just carry on with whatever you'd normally be doing while it's charging, and you can drag and drop stuff to it while it's going as well.

To get your bits on here, you can just open up My Computer or Internet Explorer and drag and drop files to the appropriate folders on your Go Gear. The Go Gear shows up like a USB external device would, next to your F drive and what not, so you can go into it and fiddle around adding or deleting files really easily.

You can transfer bulks of MP3 music files in one go, for instance you can just pick up an album and drop it over the Go Gear if you want to copy the whole album at once. It only takes a matter of seconds to get music files on here. A good tip is that you can just chuck all the files on top of the 'music' file on the Go Gear drive, and the Go Gear will sort them out itself into albums etc. I thought I was going to have to do that myself, but the Go Gear did it automatically. Getting photos on here is just as simple, drag and drop them onto the 'photo' folder the same as you did with the MP3 files on the 'music' folder.

It's getting video on here that's the time consuming bit. It took me a while to figure it out, but I got there in the end! Firstly, all files have to be in WMV format, and that's before you even convert them for use on the Go Gear using the conversion software that's included. I found the easiest way to get little videos on here was to pinch some off you tube using Mozilla Firefox, which is able to convert them into WMV files at the same time (YouTube's automatic format is FLV).

That took me about five minutes per ten minute clip to download, and then it takes another ten minutes or so to convert them in the Go Gear conversion software. It's very simple to do, just open the software, open the file you want, select 'device' while your Go Gear is plugged into your computer, and click 'convert'. But the drawback is how long it takes. To get a ten minute video onto your player, it easily takes fifteen to twenty minutes!

I think it's worth doing though if you know you're going to want to show someone a video, or do like I do and keep a kid entertained. You can get all kinds of Mickey Mouse cartoons off YouTube that you can put on here, so little ones can sit still and be quiet when you're stuck in traffic or waiting in a long line at the doctors.

Using the Go Gear is quite easy. You hold down the middle button to boot up the device, then use the up and down arrows to navigate between folders. Use the middle button to select the folder you want, then choose what you want to play. The buttons are quite small so you have to be a little bit careful, but over all this is easy to get around. To get out of anything, there's a return button above the control panel. To turn this off, just hold down the central button for a few seconds until it says "bye" on the screen.

The sound quality of this is alright. Not the best I've ever heard, and not even an improvement on the last budget discman I had. But it's perfectly acceptable, and the headphones included with it did the job. For ease of volume control, there's a plus and minus button on the top side of the device which you can use during play.

The video quality is also pretty decent considering the price of these things nowadays. I was surprised to find that you really can watch a cartoon on the tiny little screen, and see quite clearly everything that's going on. Don't expect top of the range graphics, and be prepared for a tiny blur to the fine details. But all in all, this is surprisingly watchable and easy to get on with.

My only grumble with this really is the shuffle function for music. For some reason, it likes to pick the same tunes over and over again! It seems to stick to fifteen main songs out of the hundred I've uploaded to it? You can over come this by simply making your own assorted playlists, but I'd have rather been able to get a random selection.

The battery life so far has been excellent for me, though I've only had mine for a couple of weeks it has to be noted. I find that it lasts for a good fifteen to twenty hours when fully charged, which when you're using it is a lot more than you might think it is. Over all I'm really chuffed with this for the price I paid. I think if you're going to pay Amazon's current price of £50 you're being had though, as you can get similar makes like Sony with double the storage capabilities for around that price. If you grab this as a clearance item like I did though - you're in for a real bargain.

Summary: Highly Recommended at the Right Price

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