Customer Reviews

Philips SA178 Solid State 512 MB Rechargeable MP3 Player

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I got this player for Christmas, and so far I have found no fault with it. The battery last for an incredibly vast amount of time, its pretty cool looking, and it holds a decent amount of songs, (pretty good if you use mainly for jogging) The one thing that I felt compelled to tell some buyer after reading some reviews was that you don't have to flip through all the songs to get to the one you want. Instead of clicking on music in the main menu, just click on folder view, then it goes to "music" just click next/fast forward button instead of clicking play and it allows you to look at all your files. Well I think if you want a handy, cheap and a quality product, I definitely recommend this.

I bought this for my 15 year old son as an inexpensive replacement after he lost his Creative Zen Micro. It seemed a bit foolish to buy him another mp3 player, but I felt sorry for him since he'd saved his money for months to buy the Creative, then lost it in a matter of weeks.

So I didn't really expect it to be around for long anyway.

Nevertheless, I was pretty unhappy when, after just about a month, I pulled my son's jacket out of the dryer and the Philips came tumbling out with it. The thing had gone through the washer AND the dryer.

I figured it was ruined for sure, but no. I turned it on; it still played, and all of the music files were still in tact.

Pretty cool.

Overall, 512 isn't much space, so my son has to constantly swap out songs from the computer hard drive. But, the player has an easy to use interface, nice appearance, sounds pretty good. And, I'd have to say, it's durable.

The userbility of this player is good and simple. Two complaints: the size of earbud, it's a bit on the large size...at least for me. The software, I hate Musicmatch, it works fine but I'm not finding it to be very simple. Who knows, next week after I've worked with it more I may like it too. I've had this player for about a week now and I've had no problems as yet, even when I'm jogging. I would recomend this player to whoever wants a nice player and doesn't want to spend alot of money.

I love the player. The addition of the FM tuner is a major bonus. Downloading to it is easy, recharges quickly, fidelity is good, and the small size is great. My only small complaint is that it does not start back up at the song you were playing after shutting down the unit.

The device itself is nice looking, easy to use, connects to your computer without a cable, and has surprisingly good FM reception (compared to my last player anyway). There is one huge problem with it though; it does not remember where in a file you were when you shut it off. This is a big problem for listening to podcasts. If I shut the player off 30 minutes into a 1 hour show, I need to fast-forward the show to get back to where I left off when I turn it back on. This is a glaring oversight, even for 2-minute music files. Hopefully they'll fix this in a firmware update sometime soon.

Given that I mainly listen to long podcasts, this last issue is a real problem for me. I'd probably give it 4 or 5 stars otherwise.

This is my first MP3 player. It is easy to set up and use. It's also compact and light, and has a bright screen - perfect for exercise and other outdoor activities. Holds approx. 125 songs or many, many hours of lectures, conference calls, audio books, etc.

I like everything about this player except the fact that it "loses your place" when you turn it off. That is, if you're part of the way through a one hour call that was recorded on a single track, you have to write down or remember where you were when you turned the player off - because it will start at the beginning of the same track when you turn it on again.

Hopefully, as another reviewer said, Philips will release a firmware update that addresses this issue. If not for that one challenge, I'd have rated it a solid 5.

Hope this helps.

As I type this review, I am currently listening to my nifty new Philips SA178 Solid State 512 Mb Rechargeable, and can't stop bragging to my friends about how great this MP3 player has turned out to be. The best feature, by far, has to be the rechargeable capability, which allows for you not to worry about having to replace the battery every 2 days...I just plug into my computer, organize my music, and I go! Perfect for the marathon I trained for! As soon as Philips makes one with a larger capacity, I'm upgrading immediately.

I bought my player from Costco a few months ago. I love the thing to death. Couple things to improve on... a protective skin would be a nice option, and an expandable memory. I love this player for it's compactness, however the memory is just okay. When I bought this product I thought it would be perfect for me, small and lightweight, but only room for approx. 120 songs. It fit a reasonable amount of songs on there, but not all of my collection. One of my only complaints is that mine wouldn't do a playlist, which is fine for me, it would have been a nice feature. I love the "on the fly" radio recording and the voice recording, for notes, ideas and thoughts. All in all, this is a great beginning product.

I bought this mp3 player just after Christmas. It worked great at first but slowly the battery started to fail. Eventually, it would not hold a charge at all, I would let it charge all night and it would only run for about 15 seconds before powering down.

I called Philips and was told it only had a 3 month warranty. A $100 plus mp3 player and it only lasts for a few months?

I picked this up at Costco, even though I hadn't seen anyone mention it as good for voice recording, because I *love* Costco's return policy. No hassle pretty much no matter *when* you bring it back. It was $80. I found it pretty easy to use right out of the box but it did require reading the manual to figure some things out. Still, not too hard.

It was dead simple to get things onto it - just drag and drop using windows explorer. It acts like another drive.

I thought it sounded ok playing music (but I'm hardly what you'd call an audiophile, I am a musician though).

I tried recording - it did ok and recorded an entire 90 minute movie sitting on top of the tv (just to sort of sense how long it could do).
But the quality was "ok". Not great by any means.

The controls were not intuitive but if you are comfortable reading a manual probably ok.

The OLED display was nice and bright! Easy to see considering how small it is. (good for those of us with bifocals! ;-)

I find the little rubber piece that protects the end of the USB incredibly poor design and it got lost right away. I imagine that's a minor flaw though.

So I decided to compare it to a few others and keep one and return the others.

After comparing it to the 1 Gig Sansa c140 I got it was no contest. The C140 voice recording just plain sounded better out of the box, used a regular AAA battery (which I like because I can buy my own rechargables and just carry a spare on a trip for example) and the controls were easier to use.

Still - as I said, I love Costco's return policy and the Philips seems like a decent, fairly inexpensive player - might be worth considering if you aren't trying to do a lot of voice recording.