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)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank

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  Electronics > Portable Audio & Video > Radios

• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 28, 2008

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

From the Manufacturer

Wake Up to Your Favorite Music, Photos and Video

Offering the ultimate in flexibility, the Philips AJL308 Clock Radio awakens you to your choice of nature sounds, radio, your own music or a traditional alarm buzzer. You can also display your favorite photo as the background image on the 7-inch color LCD screen, watch photo slideshows set to music and view video clips. Start your day off right by waking up to a treasured photo, your favorite tune or the sounds of nature. It's perfect for the bedside, but also fits attractively on your office desk. No matter what your alarm clock needs, the Philips AJL308 Clock Radio has it all.

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Wake to your own music, radio, an alarm buzzer or even sounds from nature

Start the Day Your Way

Wake Up How You Want

Start your day right by waking up how you want. The Philips AJL308 Clock Radio lets you choose your wake up call.

Hate being jolted awake? Normal alarm sounds with a preset volume are either too low to wake you up or are so uncomfortably loud that you are awakened abruptly. The Gentle Wake feature starts with a subtle, low alarm that gradually increases to a reasonably high level in order to gently rouse you from sleep. You can use the Gentle Wake feature with your own music, FM radio or the buzzer alarm and make rude awakenings a thing of the past.

Do you prefer to wake up to music or news? Digital FM radio offers you additional audio options with the ability to store up to 20 different radio stations. Simply tune into the station that you want to preset and press and hold the preset button--that's all it takes. You can quickly access your favorite radio station without having to manually tune in each time.

The AJL308 comes with an SD/MMC memory card slot so you can play your own music through the clock radio speakers. All you need to do to play MP3 or WAV files is insert an SD/MMC card with your music on it into the slot on the AJL308. The Music menu appears and you're off and running.

Dual Alarm Time

The AJL308 has two alarm settings available. Set one alarm time to wake you up and the other to wake up your partner.

Pre-loaded Relaxation Music Lets You Fall Asleep Peacefully

Relax or fall asleep to peaceful sounds. The AJL308 is pre-loaded with a number of relaxation music pieces. Choose from rain showers, ocean waves, spa music and more, and enjoy in relaxed comfort.

Easily read date, time and radio information and view photos and video

7-inch Display for Time, Date and Radio Info Viewing

The Philips AJL308 Clock Radio has a large 7-inch viewing area to enable easy readability of the content on the screen, even from a distance. It is ideal for the elderly or the visually restricted. You can also display your favorite photo as the background image.

Wake Up to Photos of Your Loved Ones

The AJL308 comes with an easy-to-use feature that allows you to display your favorite photo as the clock’s background image. When you wake up in the morning, you see not only the time, but the photo of your family, friends, pets, vacation memories--whatever you want--by your bedside. It's a nice way to start a new day.

Enjoy Digital Music or Broadcast Radio While Viewing Photos

Enjoy viewing your photos while listening to your favorite digital music or FM radio station. Simply select "Photo with music" from the menu, then sit back and enjoy them both at the same time. The AJL308 comes with USB and SD/MMC memory card slots so you can play your favorite MP3 and WMA music files through the clock radio and view your favorite digital images on the LCD at the same time.

View Special Photos in Slideshows by Your Bedside

Store your favorite photos on an SD/MMC card and play them in slideshows on your AJL308 Clock Radio. Thanks to complete file transferability, you can easily enjoy the convenience and fun of showing digital photos or video clips via the SD/MMC card slot. Just insert your memory card into the appropriate slot on your clock radio, set the display options (sequence, effects and transitions) and view your own personal slideshow on your clock radio’s screen. Now you can relive your favorite moments with family and friends any time you want.

Deep Stereo Sound

Equipped with a Bass Reflex Speaker System, the AJL308 delivers a deep bass experience from a compact loudspeaker box system for an enhanced listening experience that blows away the average clock radio.

Product Description

Start the day right with the Philips AJL308 Clock Radio, where you can wake up to the 7-inch color showing off your favorite photo, song, or video. In addition to clock, radio and calendar functions, you can even use pre-loaded relaxation music that will help you fall asleep. Built-in USB and SD card slots let you store all of your photos, music and video clips. You can enjoy music or radio channels with FM digital auto tuning and presets. Set dual alarm times and wake up gently with the increasing alarm volume.

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.

126 of 139 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.