Philips GoGear SA6025

Philips' additions to the PMP market are quite worthy of attention. The company employs sleek designs, large clear interfaces, and navigation menus that are a breeze to use. But sadly there's always something missing that could have made their devices that much more attractive. Let's take the GoGear SA6025 2GB media player, for example.

Look and Feel
Let me get to the point. The GoGear SA6025 is a small, sleek, lightweight and yes, quite a chic-looking 2GB flash player. It weighs in at just 75g with dimensions of 93.5 x 53.2 x 12.5 mm. It has a clear 2.2 inch QVGA, and an LCD display with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels sporting 65,000 colors. The large five-way navpad makes navigating menus easy, and a separate ‘Menu’ key returns you to previous options.

The volume keys are on the top, but I feel the placement of the 3.5mm earphone socket near the key lock and mini-USB slot at the bottom were a bad idea. The player can’t be propped up against anything if you’re watching something. That means it has to be held in your hand at all times. There’s a separate Playlist button on the side. On the whole, the SA6025 has a certain feel-good factor about it and it's comfortable to carry around since it’s so thin.

Features and Performance
Video
Videos are easy to watch on this screen. Philips has been kind enough to provide their media converter software for the SA6025. It’s not too fast, but if your player is connected it’ll transfer the converted files directly. It’s also compatible with Windows Media Player 11 for syncing. Forwarding videos is painful though. It takes too darn long, as if it were moving frame by frame. It would have been easier to have just watched the whole part all over again.

The problem is, the converter may be able to convert plenty of file formats extremely well in most cases, but not being able to simply copy/paste files is a real pain. Enough with the proprietary bull s**t. At one point it simply showed me 'Transferring File' and I was quite happy about that, till i tried to view the file. It never showed up on the player at all. But it was showing up in the Video folder when connected to the PC. Odd. The sound and video quality, though, are really good, so if you’re not as impatient as I am, it's all good.