Home > Consumer Reviews > Philips SA9200/17 GoGear Super-Slim 2 GB Flash MP3 Player

I just picked mine up for $135.00 at Office Depot, literally, because of how it looks. It makes the iPod look silly, casual, and plain in comparison. All gloss black, with well-designed navigation shapes that illuminate a warm blue when active, and disappear completely when inactive.

The navigation is INCREDIBLE. I've used a few iPods, and prefer the layout and interactivity of this Philips's navigation. It's got one button for forward (down a level), one for backward (up a level), and then a single line down the center for scrolling, which is highly-accurate (touch-sensitive).

My favorite part is that you can download album art OR CREATE YOUR OWN IMAGES (200 x 200 pixels) that will display while playing any particular album (or song if you configure it).

Battery life is excellent. Fonts and design are above average. Price might seem a little high, but I actually find myself THANKFUL that I spent the money and got the most attractive mp3 player I've seen to date.

Usually kind of anti-Philips, but this product is a serious home run.

Also, don't pay attention to the fact that it says Windows Media Player 10 compatibility ONLY, you can browse and use it as a pretty high-speed hard drive from My Computer easily and effectively. So, I use iTunes as my player and manager, and then just drag the album folders from my iTunes installation folder right to the Music folder of the device in Windows Explorer, and it's super fast. Then, just create a .jpg named Album Art.jpg (with the space in the filename) and put it in the same directory as the album, and whala, that's what'll show while songs from that album play.

Anyway, INCREDIBLE PRODUCT. I haven't been this excited to use a consumer electronic device since I bought my first PDA.

Final notes:
Surprisingly smooth, fluid, and classy navigational animation. I was IMPRESSED by an mp3 player. The headphones seem pretty sweet too, loud, crisp, and portable. I'm not headphone expert though. But this is my 4th mp3 player.

5 effing stars. Well-deservedly.

SERIOUSLY, Do you all have the same mp3 player I have? I have a Philips SA9200/17 GoGear Super-Slim 2GB MP3 Player... what exactly do you other guys have?

Because, I've seriously had nothing but a blast with this sexy mp3 player! Heck, it gets 3 stars for the blue LEDs that are activated by touch and follow your fingertip - n i c e!

Sound quality is better than EXCELLENT! You know people are looking for something to complain about when they complain about sound quality on an mp3 player. You can buy an el cheapo mp3 player and it'll have decent sound because of the format alone. Maybe that person had a bad set of earphones OR had them in his head upside down b/c you get acceptable sound from $10 earbuds, cmon!

I seriously think Apple must have an online team of review grunts b/c this same thing happened when the Creative line of mp3 players came out with both guns blazin'. There were far too many off the wall reviews aimed at discrediting the whole Creative line. However, Creative got past that biased crap and I'm more than confident Philips will too b/c this thing is top shelf in every respect.

I haven't gotten into the pictures and so forth yet but something is telling me since that was the ONLY gripe from the one reveiwer (and b/c he couldn't figure out how to load pics he gave it 1 star) it's probably just something you have to learn the process to and from then on it's easy going. All I can say is that it's been better than I expected in every respect especially with navigation and battery life - two really important aspects of any player like this.

I've owned two nano's and a mini. One nano was lost/stolen, sold the mini, and my first nano died on me (or I killed it) but I couldn't get it to power back on one day. I liked them all to be honest but I'd put this up against an ipod any day of the week!

jblz

I ended up returning this mp3 player, but It wasn't all bad. I'll start off by talking about what I did like about it, before saying why I ended up returning it. I see it's now $70 on amazon, which is a good price (I paid $80).

Good things:
1) I'll start off by agreeing with some of the reviewer here that this is probably THE most elegant looking mp3 player on the market. The blue touch buttons that light up when you press them are a lot of fun. The screen art is simple but elegant too. Easy to read menus and nice scrolling song titles for those long song names.
2) The scroll bar down the center is also a beautiful idea. A lot of people say that they find the touch interface too sensitive (including my wife), but I had no trouble with it at all. After about 5 minutes of using it, I was flying through the menus. The scroll bar can be used to scroll one menu item at a time, or you can swipe it to scroll very quickly down a long list. This is a great alternative to the iPod's wheel thingy, and I found myself just scrolling up and down menus for the fun of it!
3) The sound quality sounded ok to me, but I don't have a set of $300 ear buds to check it with. With my nicer Sennheiser headphones, the bass sounded rich, the trebles clear. That's all I was really after.

Now onto the things I did not like about this mp3 player.
1) The first and main thing was the resume feature. If you turn off the player for less than about 30 mins, it will resume from where you left off. That is, if you're halfway though a song, it'll star playing from that point when you turn it back on. However, if it's off for any more time that that, it will go back to the main menu when you power back on. I have some long 1.5 hour mp3s, so having to fast forward back to the same point in a track is a real pain! That brings me onto another one of my problems with this player.
2) Fast forward (within a track) is very slow! It would take about 5 mins or more to get an hour into a track. It seemed to have big issues with this, I have no idea why. I did a few things to try to fix this problem, first I upgraded the firmware (the software that is installed on the mp3 player itself), and I called customer support. That was another reason I decided to return this player.
3) The website for downloading the firmware was TERRIBLE! It was very hard to navigate, and the instructions for the firmware were very cryptic. They also don't list what has actually changed in the firmware versions, but I gather the only things they upgrade are the Vista compatibility. When I called the support line about the resume problem, I actually called twice. The first time I got a fairly helpful girl, who said that one of their technicians had taken one home and found the same thing, so it's probably a "design feature" which is not on any lists to fix. The second time I got a very unhelpful guy who kept telling me about the power off feature (it turns itself off if inactive for 5 mins or so, which is fair enough), and had no idea what I meant by the resume feature. He even told me that I could send it in, but it probably wasn't worth it!
4) The player doesn't support songs with special characters such as "&". What?!?! I spent quite some time fixing this issue on my mp3s, but when I got to Röyksopp, I refused to change their name just for the mp3 player.
5) This wasn't a problem for me, but if you don't organise your id3 tags (the tags such as track name, track number, artist etc), it will be hard to get the player to play albums in the correct order. I do organise mine, so it wasn't a problem until someone gave me some songs (legally, they were an internet mix) which were played in a random order.

So in summary: This mp3 player looks great! If you just want one for listening to regular music, not long tracks with funny names, it's great. The menus are easy to navigate, and well organised. Philips were so very nearly there with this, and hopefully in the future they'll get sorted with the problems I had. There aren't lots of flashy features, but I don't use the ones on my new mp3 player anyway (Samsung YP-T10 which I'm very happy with). I liked this player, but for my purposes, it just wasn't good enough.

I did a good amount of research before i bought this MP3 player as it is my first. I knew when i bought it that it is windows media player 10 compatible and i have WMP 11 and was willing to downgrade just because of the physical qualities and the price of this player. However i just got it in the mail today and tried to downgrade my system to WMP10 as i've had it before i upgraded to 11 and dont really care for the layout of WMP11. My computer gave me an error that my version windows isnt compatible with WMP10. So, I started transferring music files to the player using WMP11 and it was successful. However i am unable to transer pictures using WMP11. I was really looking forward to transferring some photos onto the player so that's a bummer. I tried to copy and paste photo files into the gogear file but they didnt show up on the player. I will probably try one more time to load WMP10 and see if there's another way to load the photos without WMP10....

That is the only negative experience i've had so far and like i said i knew before i bought it that it needs WMP10. Now, as far as navigation is concerned, I LOVE this player. It's very easy to transfer the songs and the player categorizes your music for you and you are able to create playlists which i havent done yet because i'm still loading up all my music. The touch screen isnt too sensitive, its just right and really easy to use. The player is very slim and beautiful glossy black with really cool blue illumination which is one of the reasons i got it. The sound quality is pretty nice and there are several EQ settings you may use. The back looks like a metal finish sort of like the ipods but its a black finish not silver. The headphones are pretty good too. I wanted a media player that wasnt too expensive but didnt lack in quality and i'm happy with my purchase. There's a lot of hype around IPods but i really wasn't interested in its plain looks. I was also looking at some of the zune players but those too didnt strike an interest for me.

Overall, besides the fact that this player should probably be capable with WMP11 i'm still stoked about the product and cant wait to bring it to work on monday...

I purchased this mp3 player on a whim. I had put off buying an mp3 player for years. Didnn't want to join the ipod nation - too much trouble. This toy met my expectations. The controls are indeed sensitive, but you get used to them. It also requires media player 10, not 11 - if you want to take advantage of the pictures. This is probably the most annonying part. Otherwise it is a winner.