By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net
IT may have come late in the mobile music player business, but Philips intends to break into the market in the Philippines and set a trend. So confident and aggressive is the company that they aim to take second place after the dominant Apple iPod series.
Philips launched six models under in its GoGear line, ranging from the basic 1 Gigabyte SA1916 to the top-of-the-line 4Gb SA3445. The company did not mention that it also carried the SA6185, a passport-size multimedia device launched sometime last year overseas and is the predecessor of the SA3445. All of the new GoGear devices have the Philips design signature: they come in a matte black finish (except for the SA1916, which can come in blue-green), curved corners and buttons that are smoothened into the body of the device. Of course, it’s expected that when Philips makes audio devices, the sound should be of the highest quality (their headsets and earphones challenge even those from Sony).
Testing out the first three products, the 1Gb SA1916, the 2Gb SA2625 and the 2Gb SA2825, their audio is nothing spectacular, particularly because they use the more basic Philips earphone sets. The base is not as audible and the treble is a pitch too high. Perhaps a better sounding earphone should make the sound from the devices stand out. I did, however, test out the SA2825 with one of Philip’s clip-on earphones and the sound was better improved that it were with the stock earphones. Take note that only the SA2825 has the Philips proprietary audio function FullSound, which greatly improves its sound quality.
The SA1916, SA2625 and SA2825 all feature FM radio functions and while antenna reception might be a problem especially inside buildings, users might not use their mobile music devices to listen to radio that often. Still, the radio signal reception of the three was pretty strong even inside a building.
The three basic models also have their own voice recording functions. It was hard to test this out especially in a noisy environment, which is always a problem with any device that has this integrated function since these also capture background noise. I suppose having this function is more of a novelty than practicality.
The multimedia models of the GoGear series are the 1 Gb SA3015, 2 Gb SA3225 and the 4 Gb Sa3445, all of which have video playback and can view photos as well. The SA3015 is the smallest of the three and has the smallest screen at 1.5-inches, while its two big brothers have 1.8-inch screens. The bigger models also render videos at 220×176 pixels while the SA31015 can only render at 128×128 pixels. These players can only play .smv (streaming mobile video) files but Philips says the devices come with video converters for video in different formats such as .mov, .mp4, .vob, and .wmv.
Conversion is by no means necessary when playing on small screens because a lot of the file sizes of videos are dependent on the video quality. Because there’s no need to view high-quality videos in small screens, Philips just decided to keep things small for their multimedia players. The small screen size practically hides the pixelation caused by videos encoded into smaller formats, which is also beneficial to the GoGear series’ memory capacity.
Surprisingly, the user interface of the GoGear multimedia models is very basic and looks as if it came straight from the previous generation of multimedia phones. The user interface lacks the dynamic flair seen in the Apple iPod.
In terms of other functions, the GoGear series is basically the same with their smaller brethren. These also have FM radio functions, voice recording, and very long battery life. Philips claims their GoGear’s batteries can last over 20 hours in music playback and between 2 to 4 hours video playback. Except for the SA2625, all of the GoGear models are rechargeable through their USB ports.
It is going to be a challenge for the Dutch company to penetrate the mobile multimedia device business but as the company said, they’re targeting to take second place in this business in the Philippines. The company is already enjoying good business in its audio-video and home appliance segments but it’s still wait-and-see for their new foray into the mobile multimedia device.
Philips is also notorious for the names it gives its devices. It should try to join the crowd when naming their devices because people might not be able to get past the first two letters of their GoGear products. I couldn’t.
