Philips GoGear Cam

After the previous GoGear Muse was not found to be too a”muse”ing, Philips must have thought of making a comeback with the GoGear Cam which is supposed to be a player with a camera, something to take on Apple’s iPod Nano 5th generation. Let’s peek into the lens of the GoGear Cam.

Design

The player has a neat build and the buttons are placed well enough to give it a feel of a compact camera. But once you plug in the earphones through the audio jack on the right of the player, you are reminded it’s a PMP! There is a mini-USB slot for transferring songs as well as charging the player. The top of the player has two buttons for the volume and a switch to lock or power on/off the player. There is a slot for a Micro SD card below. The front of the player has a small screen on the left and a 4-way navigation wheel with a centre button meant to select or play media. Surrounding this wheel is a dial which helps to switch between four options which are Play mode, Camera mode, Video mode, and Settings mode. Below the dial there are two buttons of which one is meant to go back to the previous menu and one to check details/options associated with a file. From a design point of view there’s nothing bad about the GoGear Cam!

Performance & Features

Firstly, the interface is quite simple, maybe not very good to look at but nevertheless it’s very functional but not very smooth at times. Browsing through songs is quite easy and nice. It’s been long since I came across a player that plays songs by fading into the track. It’s really an old concept, not that it’s bad or something but people are mostly used to getting on with the song rather than drifting into the song! Anyways, keeping that aside, the sound quality is really good thanks to the FullSound technology. There is an issue with the loudness in the audio because once you play songs in a crowded environment chances are you hear the surroundings more!  

The video quality is quite decent for the size of the screen, and the picture clarity is quite nice again keeping in mind that it’s not a video player really. The fact that it can play AVI and MP4 files means that you don’t need to convert every file that you have out there. There is a bit of framing while the video’s playing but nothing very serious to be honest.

Now coming to one of the main features of the GoGear Cam is the camera that the player boasts of. Unlike the iPod’s VGA camera this one’s got a 2 Megapixel camera and the photos that you get are really good. Even opening them on your computer doesn’t stretch the image, thus proving that the camera can really click some good photos. The video quality is quite nice too, both in the player as well as the PC. So overall, the camera is something that I really liked.

The battery life is quite nice too, with 11 hours and 30 minutes of music playback and about 3 and a half hours of video playback. The memory is also expandable upto 40 GB using a 32 GB Micro SD card.

Verdict
While there are many things that make this PMP a good player, it doesn’t get a five on five due to some reasons. The loudness of the audio is not really good and it is very necessary to have that especially because well, that’s what it should be doing in the first place. Secondly the interface is a bit sluggish and can put you off at times. Apart from these two reasons it is good value for money for the fact that you can store quite some media with it. At a price of Rs. 7,500 this is a very good buy.