I picked up my GoGear for a little over £50 on ebay over a year ago and thought that was a decent price for an mp3 player with video playback capability and 16GB storage. It was, admittedly, factory reconditioned but if that knocks a nice chunk off the price then that's fine with me. I also liked the design of the device-very slimline, satisfyingly weighty and with a well-made feel.

As a straightforward mp3 player the sound quality is decent enough. I am not very demanding when it comes to mp3 players and don't require them to be brimming with features as I just use my player for train journeys and jogging, so if it works, it works. However there were quite a few issues with the player that I feel I should draw attention too.

The navigation is not fantastic. Scrolling through the menus would often jump, skip and stick in an irritating way meaning it would take a bit of fiddling to select the piece of music I wanted to listen to. Obviously for the price I wasn't going to get something as intuitive as an ipod interface but this grated.

The video playback, which admittedly wasn't my main reason for buying the player, only accepts WMA format, which none of my videos are in. As I'm no fan of squinting at tiny little screens to watch my favourite TV series anyway this didn't cause me too much of a problem but I would warn anyone buying this for the playback capability to bear this in mind as while you can convert your files to WMA the process is irritating and considering other Philips GoGear players seem to play a variety of formats from reviews I've seen it's an irritating quirk that the playback is so limited. File formats for music playback are limited to mp3 and wma as well, which is okay 90% of the time but an occasional irritation.

Like most mp3 players you can play radio and record through the device. No complaints here, both are easy to use and the recording is nice and clear.

One problem I had which may just have been my unit-my player froze 3 or 4 times when I first bought it and I had to reset it by sticking a paperclip in a tiny hole in the side like a tamagotchi. This was frustrating and I was on the verge of sending it back but in the end this suddenly righted itself. I cannot say why this happened and may be because it was factory reconditioned. However, in the long term it hasn't caused me any further problems.

The bundled headphones are rubbish but this is par for the course, it's rare you get a decent pair with and mp3 player and I had some decent ones on hand to use.

All in all for £50 I couldn't complain and it does everything I require from a player, but if you want something special from your mp3 player I'd look elsewhere and spend some more cash. For someone who wants to watch videos and have a nice amount of storage space though it's a bargain