Philips GoGear Aria Reviews
- Wednesday, May 6, 2009, 4:28
- Mp3 Players
- 3,996 views
- 3 comments
Philips is among the oldest manufacturers of music and video players. The GoGear Aria is another addition to its lineup of inexpensive MP3 players. The GoGear Aria has little to offer when it comes to any advanced features but the music player will definitely entice lot of users due to its price of $79 for 8GB and $99 for 16GB versions.
Like any other Philips MP3 players, the GoGear Aria boasts of curvaceous and glossy casing, which is designed in black and gray. The only difference between the Aria and its siblings is the unique navigation array consisting of four-way navigation control that surrounds a metallic scroll, which in turn houses the play button. The player is very simple and intuitive to use as there is nothing new about the navigation controls that are provided. The central play button doubles as Enter key when you are navigating through the menus or selecting any feature.
The navigation feels a bit frustrating when you are browsing images, as the left and right keys are dedicated for rotating the images and the vertical rocker is used for advancing through the images.
The GoGear Aria boasts of 2-inch color display, which has native resolution of 220 x 176 pixels. The player offers all the standard features that you will find on most music player. However, there are some features that separate the Aria from other music players. These include high quality earphones and Rhapsody subscription music DNA. If you have Rhapsody’s subscription than you can enjoy the Rhapsody Channels menu with your music player. But the users without any subscription will have to satisfy themselves with the basic features that are offered by GoGear Aria.
The file formats supported by Aria are rather limited. The music player supports only the MP3 and WMA formats as compared to other player that support FLAC, Ogg, and WAV formats as well. The same is true for the video formats as the player only supports the SMV files at resolution of 200×176 pixels. This means you will have to use the included software very frequently.
The Philips GoGear Aria has rated battery life of 30 hours of music playback and 6 hours of video. The video quality offered by Aria is bit disappointing but the audio quality is pretty decent.
This MP3 player is horrible. A week after I bought it I noticed that it sometimes turned itself off when I increased the volume. I sent an email to the support folks. They sent an email back telling me I should push the reset button and then go to the website and download the latest firmware. I shouldn’t worry about my music because it would only reset the firmware. It deleted EVERYTHING. Fortunately I have it all on my PC and just resynced it all.
After doing that it still would shut itself off some times when I increased the volume. I sent another email. They had me call the 800 number.
I called the told the tech what I had already done. He said that is what he would have walked me through and that they would send me a replacement player. I waited two weeks. It was Christmas and I thought everything might be slower. I finally called back and they said the tech should have walked me through everything again and so they hadn’t sent me one. That tech then walked me through the reset process again. After that I copied a couple songs over to the player and tested it. It worked fine, but I told the tech it didn’t always do that.
After another week it was shutting itself off again. I called again and the lady said she’d send me a new one. Then she called back and said she couldn’t authorize that, I had to talk to someone in a different department. That lady wanted my credit card number. I didn’t feel I should give her my credit card number I already did that with another company and it took three months to get the charges off of my credit card.
I sent the player to my brother and told him he could have it and warned him about the problem with the player shutting itself off and the trouble with the company. He said he would see if he could use it and maybe call the company and ask to talk to a supervisor. He called me back and told me they said the warranty was up and they couldn’t do anything about it.
Beware – I will never buy anything from this company again.
The reviewer neglected to mention one of the main features that differentiates GoGear Aria from other players: the microphone. The on-board mic is handy for recording meetings. The user has to navigate a menu to start an audio recording, so I wouldn’t say it matches the ease of use of a dedicated voice recorder, but it is a nice feature (which some iPods don’t have). My biggest gripe with this player is it doesn’t have a decent interface for creating playlists. You sync your library with it through Rhapsody software, which doesn’t really have any search capabilities, making it very difficult to sort out a large music library.
Bought one of these thinking “Hmm its cheap, 16gbs and its by Philips, what could go wrong?”
I was wrong. The Interface is really average probably worse than the previous, simpler 128mb mp3 i had. Another Issue with the player is that when u’re almost @ full capacity it laggs like hell and some times freezes when you try to load a playlist. Unlike the iPod if you wish to create a playlist you’ll HAVE to sync it with wmp… Another Issue with it is that when you lock the ‘keypad” with the Lock switch it doesnt actually ‘Lock” the player. This is evident when the player in safely tucked in my pocket, though in the lock mode when the Right Button is pressed for a long time it acctivates the ‘fastforeward’ function stopping the Music -__-”
Stay away from this product, I’d rather buy an iPod instead even though i hate the fact that i’ll have to sync it with iTunes.