My beloved Philips GoGear Vibe Vs Sony NWZA845

[dust2dust]

Okay so, Sony must 'of course' make the superior player, and I was just being silly holding on to my Philips love for all of these years...right..?

I own both of these players and here are the main points that have me now reverting back to my Philips Vibe.

Main reason for owning any mp3 player : Sound. To be perfectly honest, I've listened to both of them at length now and I listen to a wide variety of audiobooks on them with subtle nuances in the special effects in some that are going to test any mp3 player in terms of reproduction. Result ? There is barely any difference in sound quality whatsoever. And Philips is the 'underdog'...?

Video : Or course, I will concede that the Sony, with it's OLED screen absolutely trounces the Philips with it's ye olde lcd effort. Viewing angles on video on the Sony are absolutely insane. Viewing angles on the Philips are tragic.

Ease of use : A while back Philips got a positive nod for introducing players where you could delete tracks directly from the player without needing to hook it up to your computer to do so. Imagine what a let down it was finding out that this brand new flashy OLED backlit Sony mp4 player.....can't do this. Oh dear.

I only really use my mp3 players in bed, to help me sleep, this they need to not be silly touchscreen ones, because I need tactile buttons when they're under the covers. The Philips is nice and tactile and solid for skipping, pausing and adjusting volume. The Sony, by contrast, regularly had my fingers slipping all over the front buttons - the design clearly intended to look all flashy with precious little thought given to the fact you might not actually be staring at 100% of the time when using it.

The power button on the Philips Vibe is, admittedly, a bit rubbish. But at least it is actually the ONLY power button. Press ANY button on the Sony, for even less than 1 second, and the damn thing thinks you want to turn it on again. There is no practical purpose that I can think of for having any button at all turn your mp3 player on again.

Menu systems ? The Philips menu system is basic. It WORKS. Oooh you can move sideways, up, down, in and out on the Sony one. Have you tried finding anything in a great hurry like that ? "I think the way you meant to look for that track was...." Here is what the very definition of a "menu" should be : up and down. Thank you, Philips.

Support : The Philips Vibe supports just about every sound format you can think of - despite it's tiny size. The Sony doesn't even support .flac. Oops.

I'm so sick of Philips being bashed. In my experience of their players over the years they've been nothing but one thing : RELIABLE. No they're not the flashiest of players. But their response times have markedly improved as has the format support. Yes they've made some REALLY bad design decisions (not least the Ariaz prior to the current one) but I can't help wondering if I'm somehow living under a magic toadstool to have never once experienced all these "my GoGear won't turn on again" or "my GoGear broke after a week" or "my GoGear takes 3 whole minutes to start up" that I read of in any of the 4 generations of them I've gone through now. Have I really managed to find the only reliable batch of their players or something ? Let's be a little more realistic.

Philips might be accused of being boring but in my own personal experience their players are always reliable and always highly practical and that's why even after dabbling in Sony I just can't shake my lurve.

[CrowdAds]

[Atarii]

I would agree that "reliable" is a good description of Phillip's Mp3 players.

Except for the bloody Muse. I wish that one had never existed and I wouldn't have wasted my money on it! ARGH! And the worst part about it?

If not for a mere two problems or so, it would have been absolutely perfect.

Amazing what very small problems can do to a player.

[MotorMouth]

Yeah, Philips is a massively under-rated company. After all, they invented both audio cassettes and CDs and anything of theirs I've owned over the years has been excellent. They deserve to be far better regarded than they are.

[skip252]

Not in the area of DAPs and PMPs. The hardware is fair at best and the firmware is erratic when it functions at all.

I owned Philips DAPs until I finally got tired of having to be sure to carry a paper clip or something to reset them when they crapped out for no apparent reason. Eventually I got tired of the continuous attempts at updating and renewing the firmware and knowing the RMA procedures by heart and gave up.

[FreeZ5]

dudt2dust...

Clp Zip works great as a bedtime player.

Steve

[Big Sky]

While I don't know anything about Phillips DAP's. They look like a toy is what had put me off. I can speak of Phillips Quality though. Over the years I have owned Phillips Audio and Video gear. All well built and engineered. I have a pair of 30 yr old speakers that don't see much use (in Storage) because of the size. I bought them at a Radio Shack for about $150. These speakers sound better than any Bose speaker then and now. Compared to many high end speakers they hold their own.

I am glad you enjoy your player. That's what its all about.

[skip252]

I'm not saying that Philips isn't capable of making quality products. You'll notice I said "Not in the area of DAPs and PMPs" in response to the statement they need to be better regarded. I've owned several other Philips products including headphones that performed as well, if not better, as other products in their price range.

I still regret that I had the SHE 9500 before I learned to treat my IEMs with care. They didn't cost much and the SQ was excellent for the price. I'm not surprised there are low priced Philips that are currently FOTM. If they are anywhere near as good as the SHE 9500 they deserve to be noticed.

The DAPs of theirs I owned just weren't up to snuff. The sound was decent and the UI was easy to learn. None of that made a difference when one would decide to go belly up and I wasn't at home to try to revive it. Notice I said "try".

Reinstalling the firmware was iffy at best. At least half the time the installer would report success and hadn't done anything. Another 30% of the time it would report failure. The other 20% of the time it would work but the fix was always temporary. I had too many other options to keep playing that game so I decided to go with those instead of continuing to frustrate myself.

[JK98]

The Philips players may not be bad, but for the price, the Sandisk Clip+ seems much better. I am hoping Sandisk will come out with a nice new Fuze model at the end of August. I like my original Fuze, but not as much as the Clip+.