Philips GoGear Vibe Review: Is This MP3 Player a Good Buy?
Philips GoGear Vibe
The Philips GoGear Vibe is one of the cheapest MP3 players on the market. It has a nice cute design and offers all the standard features you would expect from an MP3 player in this price range. It offers great audio quality and comes with an FM Radio too. It comes with the headphones and the data cable.
Philips GoGear Vibe Specifications
- Dimensions: 66 x 42 x 12 mm
- Weight: 34 gms
- Display: 1.5 inch LCD display, 128 x 128 pixels
- Storage Capacity: 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB
- Audio Formats: MP3, WMA
- Data Transfer Mode: MTP, MSC
- Connection: USB 2.0
- Features: Equalizer, FM Radio with RDS, Sleep timer, Playlists
- Battery Life: 25 hours audio playback, 4 hours video playback
- Price: $39 (4 GB)
Design (4 out of 5)
The design of the Philips GoGear Vibe is really good. The shape of the player and the design is extremely appealing. It has a 1.5 inch display on the front with a resolution of 128 x 128 pixels. Below the display, there is the 4 way control pad. On the right side, you will find the volume rocker and the options button while on the left, you will find the power switch. The 3.5mm audio jack, mic, and USB port can be seen at the bottom.
It offers great build quality even though the body is composed mainly of plastic. The glossy black body looks great and feels sturdy. Pressing the depressed area on Vibe’s control pad on the center does nothing, which is a bit weird. The four keys can be used to navigate through the interface, browse tracks and play/pause them.
The display isn’t much to speak of, being really small, but it can be used to browse the interface. Viewing videos and images on the 1.5 inch display is a very bad idea.
Features (3 out of 5)
The Philips GoGear Vibe comes with an interface which is similar to that of the Philips GoGear Spark. You have options to access music, videos, pictures, FM radio, recordings, folders, and settings. You also have support for themes and a screensaver. The display isn’t as good as the GoGear Spark’s OLED display but is decent enough for a player in this price range. It has a built in equalizer and an FM radio with RDS. The FM radio reception is quite good. It also comes with a sleep timer which allows you to turn the player off after a fixed time. It supports both the MTP and MSC transfer protocols which makes it compatible with all operating systems: Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
You can browse through the music by songs, artist, album, and playlists. It supports the MP3, WMA, Audible audiobooks (You might also be interested in checking out What iPod or MP3 Player is Best for Audiobooks?). The Philips GoGear Vibe also comes with an audio recorder and can also play videos and display images.
Performance (3 out of 5)
The sound quality of the Philips GoGear Vibe is pretty good for its price. You can easily use it as your music player. The included headphones are pretty decent but you can also use your own headphones with the 3.5 mm audio jack. The video playback is really bad at the 128 x 128 resolution and should be avoided if possible. It comes with a video converter which you can use to transfer videos to the Vibe. Similarly, viewing images on the Vibe is not recommended. This player should be used only for listening to music. The voice recording feature works pretty well and saves the recordings as MP3 files with decent audio quality. It has a battery life of about 25 hours for audio playback which is really good.
The Verdict (3 out of 5)
The Philips GoGear Vibe is quite a decent option when it comes to the music playback. It also has a few extra features like video playback, FM radio, images, voice recorder, etc. In this price range, you might also be interested in checking out the Archos 1 Vision.
