Philips GoGear Vibe 4 GB MP3 Video Player with 1.5-Inch Color Screen (Black)

by Philips

Product Features

• Playback MP3, WMA or DRM music from subscription services
• FM radio with RDS and 20 presets for more music options
• 1.5" Full color display for easy navigation and album art
• Up to 25-hour music or 4-hour video playback
• Easy video downloads from the Internet to your GoGear
• It is easy to download video from the Internet to your GoGear.
• It has up to 25-hour music or 4-hour video playback.
• It has FM radio with RDS and 20 presets for more music options.
• You can playback MP3, WMA or DRM music from subscription services.
• It has 1.5" full color display for easy navigation and album art.

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Product Description

Philips GoGear ViBE Portable AV Player (4GB) packs big entertainment in a superbly small design. Its 1.5” full color display shows off album art and folder view ensures easy file navigation and organization.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 70 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A lot of bang for the buck August 18, 2009

By G. Wright

With a large outdoor project looming on the horizon I decided to purchase an MP3 Player to listen to my tunes as I work. After a lengthy review process both locally and online I finally decided to purchase the GoGear Vibe 4Gig player.

Overall I am very happy with my purchase. It plays my music very well. I even hooked it up to my full over ear headphones and some external speakers and it did quite well. I really enjoyed the equalizer feature as this did an excellent job of improving the music that I like to listen to. There are multiple presets based on Music Genres plus there is a custom setting as well. I advise you to try all the presets as I found the Rap setting improved my tunes the most, though that isn't the music I listen to. The controls are well laid out though the front panel toggle can be a bit twitchy causing mistaken key presses.

The device synch's very easily with your PC and I use the standard windows explorer to edit the files that are on it. The Rapsody player it is bundled with is a bit annoying. Take care when you have the Windows media player synch with the device for the first time. The darn thing went across my entire hard drive and synched every single WMA it could find! My only complaint with that is that it isn't perfect. It took compilations and created folders for each and every artist who was involved making it almost impossible to listen to the work together. Plus I have some older works that I have collected from several different sources that it insisted on making up lots of folders that would contain only 1 song in it. Then it would simply confuse some tracks and place them in the wrong folders. The best way I have found around this is to edit all those songs back into 1 folder to play those selections from the folder option and not the artist option. So far it has randomized my tracks well and I haven't been able to detect a pattern. I would like to try track editing software to attempt a more professional solution but I haven't tried this yet.

I'm afraid I can't evaluate the player for anything other than an MP3/WMA player as that is all I have been using it for although the album art does show up rather well on the very tiny screen (The screen is about the size of those keychain photo viewers.) I did use the FM also and it works well. The device has no expansion slots so you should make sure your music can fit in the 3.6 Gigs of formatted space. I don't have a massive collection of music so 4 Gigs was enough to carry my current collection and still leave a good amount of space for more music or some snapshots. I use the Phillips athletic armband carrier (Not included but I recommend it)to lug it around as it has no belt clip, but the carrier does a great job of protecting the device and gives you easy access to all of its features.

It plays for a very long time on a charge. I have let it run for better than 8 hours and it was still going. I don't yet know how long it will play before it needs a charge. It recharges very easily from a PC USB port fully in about 3 hours. It does have an extremely short recharge cable that only measures 4.75" long from tip to tip, but I have found any standard large port to small port USB cable (Like those of camera stick readers) allows it to recharge. The headphones that it comes with do an okay job of playing but they bothered my ears after a few hours so I bought some JVC in the ear buds for it that I like much better.

A Word of Warning! Only use the reset button in absolute emergencies. I used it casually to try to get it to the set time function and completely locked the player down! It would refuse to do anything after that. I thought I was going to have to take it back to the store, but I was able to get the Philips GoGear VIBE Device Manager to finally see it (Hold the + portion of the volume control down until it sees it) and it was able to update the firmware and restore the device to working order. This was great except it completely erased the Player! I had to restore my entire collection to the device again.

Other than that 1 hiccup (caused by me) the device has performed flawlessly ever since and I am really enjoying it. It has an excellent array of features compared with devices that cost twice as much.

56 of 59 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars BEWARE - Rechargeable battery can not be replaced February 3, 2010

By Scott Schreier

Called Philips twice and confirmed the rechargeable battery can not be replaced. When the battery fails the unit should be recycled. Philips customer service said perhaps the battery will last several years, but also admitted some fail within the first year, and there is only a 90 day warranty. Here's the statement on the Philips website that mislead me into believing the battery could be replaced, "Rechargeable batteries have a limited number of charge cycles and may eventually need to be replaced. Battery life and number of charge cycles vary by use and settings." According to Philips customer service the batteries can be replaced by recycling the battery, and then purchasing another GoGear Vibe.

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good audio player but a bad video player.... November 13, 2009

By Ms. Isobel J. Parker

First off, this is a good audio player. The sound is crisp and clear, good for a reasonably cheap player. However, I would buy new earphones as the ones it comes with are a bit on the cheap side. It has some good features, although it would be nice if, like the Zen Mosaic it had a feature where you could save your place in an audiobook, its a bit annoying having to constantly fast forward to reach the place you were at. The video function...well I can't even get videos onto my player. The converter sftware doesn't convert videos no matter what format they originally were, and I can't imagine the screen is big enough to prevent headaches when watching something.
All in all, a good player but don't buy this if you want a video player.