Home > Consumer Reviews > Philips GoGear SA2820 2Gb MP3 Player

This is a great little mp3 player:

- appears as a drive in Windows, drag and drop your music, no need to install anything

- radio works well

- three line display puts the ipod shuffle to shame; it's quick to boot and you can find the music you want to listen to in a snap.

- the sound quality is excellent, far better than I was expecting (included headphones are, as exepected, rubbish).

It's pretty small, well built and comes with a neckstrap; I bought this for running with, no need to buy an extra arm band with this player.

The included firmware is now solid - previously it was sold with poor buggy software. A new version is available for download (v.5) though to be honest I found the update procedure to be difficult and haven't noticed any benefits with the update.

If you're after a small cheap mp3 player in the 'shuttle' class I'd highly recommend this. The only real downside I can think of is lack of iTunes support.

I've had it for about a month and so far very pleased with it.

Lots of functionality for such a small item. Very easy to use. As well as the play/menu/volume buttons on the side the whole front panel forms a forward back up down control for menu and track navigation.

Its really easy to drag and drop files on to it, just plug into any PC (I have used it with xp and vista) and its recognised as a storage device, no need to load the software that comes with it. The player recognises the mp3s artist/title info but you can also set up a directory structure if you want. You can then navigate tracks using either their Artist/Title tags or using your directory structure, very useful if you have files without tags.

Build quality seems pretty good for a small plastic unit, so hopefully controls will stand up to repeated use.It looks good, nice mirrored effect on the front. (though this will scratch if I keep putting it in my pocket with keys and change!).

Battery life is very long, I haven't kept proper track of it so I don't know if it is as high as the claimed 20 hrs but it certainly lasts a few days at an hour or two a day, and charges quickly through the usb.

- Obviously the supplied headphones are low quality, so using this with my £50 Shure ones instead
- Sound quality better than average
- The unit is smaller than a custard-cream, I like that
- Expertly made, shiny front
- No radio, although mentioned in book
- Fast forward very good compared to others
- Rechargeable through USB
- Drag and drop your music via USB, no need for iLunacy or SonicStank :)

BEFORE FIRMWARE UPDATE (v2.04):
- Annoyingly does not resume playing at exactly the same point after pausing for a couple of minutes, like my old Sony Bean did
- Takes a minute to turn on

AFTER FIRMWARE UPDATE (v3.00):
- If re-used within a few minutes it resumes at correct point
- and takes only 11 seconds to start playing
- If left for longer it doesn't resume and you have to go through the menu and choose Resume Last, which starts at the *beginning* of the track you were on, not at the point where you paused it. Weird and annoying, especially if you are playing a long track, like a mix.

Overall I like it but just a bit annoyed about the resume. The update utility and firmware can be downloaded from www.support.philips.com/support, and its very easy to do. Don't dip it in your tea!

I bought this a little over a month ago and i feel that there's some things that you should know if you're looking to buy this. I have never written a review before but feel that people should know in detail what they are getting.

I purchased this because I simply wanted a cheap MP3 player, and specifically not an iPod (expensive and my one i bought a few years back has just stopped working over time!) If like me, you have all your music in itunes then this becomes a very big problem. On itunes the songs are all stored as m4a files and when you download them to this player they are not recognised and you cannot play them. This player only recognises MP3 Files which meant I had to go through my entire library and convert them before they would play here. It was very very time consuming and very very frustrating, most probably because this is not explained anywhere and i had to figure it all out for myself!!!

However, once I'd done this, the player works very well. The drag and drop system is very efficient. It can take quite a while to go through all of the artists if, like me, you have a fair amount but the music quality is very good, probably better than my old iPod.

Unfortunately, there is no radio attached, which is a bit rubbish because it tells you that there is

Overall, it gets 4 stars because of the quality of the sound and the fact that it looks fantastic. It could of been higher (in fact it is probably closer to 3.5/5) but the sheer frustration of that earlier problem annoyed me greatly. Decent purchase though

Great product, ideal size, easy to use and good battery life. Sound quality is good and for the price it's got a lot of memory. It pays to shop around as I managed to pick up one for £35 (only a fiver more than Amazon are asking for the 2GB version) I won't say where I got it as they will delete this review but to give you a clue it was from a high street chain named after a large rock flying through space. No real problems with use, can take a few seconds to load up the first time you turn it on after putting new files on it. As for the malfunctions others have mentioned (deleting files when down button is held down) this is simply the way you delete files. Avoid holding down the down button or put the key lock on and this problem is avoided. All in all a great little product for the price.