Philips USA AJL308 Clock Radio with 7-Inch TFT LCD Color Display and USB/SD Card Slot

Other products by Philips

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 3.7 x 8.2 x 6.6 inches ; 2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000U6LEGS
• Item model number: AJL308
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 28, 2008

Product Description

Product Description

Why not add meaning to your daily routine with a beloved photo, favorite song or video by your side? The AJL308 Clock Radio with 7" color display and handy USB/SD card slot can help you start your day right.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

132 of 135 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Toying with perfection, September 18, 2007

By	Michael Ellars (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There is a lot to love about this product. It's sleek. It's stylish. It's bright, bold and clear. (It can be dimmed!) It's a clock-radio with two independent alarms that also plays audio files (.mp3 and .wma), video (mpeg4 and divx codices) and photo slide shows (.jpg only). It has built-in "relaxation" sounds to help you fall asleep. It has so much going for it! And just when you think it can't get any better...

It doesn't get better. It slips a little. You start thinking to yourself, "If only..." and "Why didn't they just take the next step?" Why isn't there a tiny bit of built-in memory so that I don't need a SD card or USB stick to be attached to change the cute-but-becoming-annoying default photo? Why can't I select an audio file on the SD or USB as my alarm music? Why only three built-in sounds for the "relaxation" music? Why isn't there an AM tuner? Why isn't there a headphone jack? Why can I only display JPEG-format images? For a widescreen 7" LCD picture frame, why is the resolution only 480 x 234? Why isn't there a back-up battery?

This is such a near-perfect little gadget that it's painful to see how close Philips came to making the best device on the market. Yet despite these flaws, it is still so wonderful that it demands four stars. Lucky for Philips, there don't seem to be any viable alternatives with all of the features it does have at this price point... yet.

And regarding the day-of-the-week issue: Philips posted a firmware update on their Web site on September 14, 2007, that fixes this issue. Visit the Philips Web site, type in "AJL308" to find the product page, select the Support link tab (just above and to the right of the product image), and scroll down to the Software section. There is a PDF read-me file and a ZIP file with the actual firmware update. Read the PDF and carefully follow its directions to update the firmware. You'll need a USB drive to transfer the firmware update to your AJL308, and it takes several minutes to complete the update, but once it's done the day of the week should be correct.

127 of 140 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Form over Function, December 10, 2007

By	RainmanRD (Wexford, Pa. USA) - See all my reviews

You'll be impressed when you take this unit out of the box...a very handsome design, until you turn it on. There are two fatal flaws, and several annoyances. First, even in "dim" setting, the considerable real estate on the 7" LCD gives off so much light that you can read a newspaper in the room (I tried it!). I would need eyeshades to sleep in the same room. (You get the choice of red, green, blue, and purple "wallpaper", but NOT black, which would have solved this problem, at least at night). Second, and I can't believe this: a full half of the screen in "clock" mode is taken up by the picture frame. However, you have three choices for that half of the screen (which you will be seeing all night long): 1. You can forever look at the picture of two people that Philips has selected to be your permanent roommates, or 2. You can load your own photo, BUT that will require you to have a USB memory stick permanently protruding from the left side of the unit, or 3. Buy a separate SD Card and somehow figure out how to get your picture loaded onto it. (The unit has no internal memory, so when you remove the memory stick or card, you can only see the default picture, and it can NOT be turned off!)

Now, the annoyances: This unit is multi-functional, but none of the functions are designed to work together. For instance, you may select "photo/video" mode and view your pictures in sequence (the random setting does not seem to work), which makes this a mediocre digital picture frame. However, when you return to "clock" mode, you will NOT see the slideshow of all of your pictures, only the first picture on the stick (you can't select), or worse, the default picture.

Next, you can not set view your alarm settings while in "tuner" (radio) mode. It's one or the other. If you want to change your alarm setting, you must select "clock" which turns the radio off, and vice versa.

I consider this product to be completely unusable as a bedroom alarm clock. It seems to have been designed by committee, with no one talking to each other, and no one having tried to live with the final product.

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice hardware, poor software, October 20, 2007

By	TJS (SF Bay Area) - See all my reviews

A previous reviewer pretty much pegged it: stylish hardware, nice screen, nothing else I've seen quite like it at this price point. But oh, where did they go to get the software??? Imagine: file names with only the first six characters displayed; no effective way to navigate among (thousands of) music or picture files; white borders on the sides of standard 4:3 ratio pictures contrasting glaringly with the glossy black frame; or, use the 16:9 screen format and just not show people's heads; no slide show in Clock mode and no way to permanently replace the default picture that someone at Philips at least seems to like; and then there's the randomizer that doesn't really seem to. The operation of the unit isn't exactly intuitive either, and the documentation doesn't cover all features. They could easily fix most of the shortcomings in a software update, but remarkably enough the Philips website doesn't have a way for you to submit suggestions or complaints (that's a 'future'). A great pity, because they almost got it right on this one.