Jan 13 2008
Philips Portable Media Center
What can I say? Albert is the King of Christmas presents. As you’ve probably guessed from the title and the past two sentences, I received the Philips Portable Media Center as a Christmas present from Al this past year.
The side of the box gives the most important descriptive details about the device. It is 30GB which apparently means that it can store up to 130 hours of video or up to 15,000 songs. There is some test content that comes with the media player such as songs by bands that I had never before heard of. However, the user is really responsible for downloading their own songs or media content onto the player. When I first opened it up, Albert was kind enough to load some music and photos onto it for me and I enjoyed that for awhile. Then I plugged it in to recharge it and sort of left it to collect dust for a week or two.
In the meantime Albert discovered a great new television show (thanks to Sean) called ‘The Big Bang Theory’. Because my schedule and Al’s don’t always coincide we weren’t able to watch all of the episodes together and essentially he’d seen the entire series-to-date before I’d even watched the 2nd one. Long story short, Al recovered the media player, dusted it off and figured out how to download the video content (something that I’d been promising to figure out how to do since opening the box) and put all of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ on it for me. I can’t remember the last time that Ekrina’s dance or chorus practices have been so much fun for mom. I spent the entire time catching up on this show.
The video is extremely clear and the sound was perfect. Actually the video on the media player probably looks better than it did on the TV. I’d say it is approaching HD quality even though it’s a tiny screen (3.5″). The media player has speakers or it can be used with headphones (a nice pair was included in the box) if you are using it in an area where a lot of noise is not permitted or if you just don’t want anyone to overhear the song or show you are watching. It is also extremely easy to navigate. There are only essentially three buttons – the one in the middle is a “Windows” button and it takes you to the main menu of the media player where you can select what type of media you want to view (e.g. photos, videos, music, etc.), then the button on the left is a round navigation button that basically if you press up – down – left – right that is the area that you will select from the menu and then there is an “ok” dot in the middle of it, and finally the button on the right side is the same type of button you would see on any CD player or DVD player remote that has the play, fast-forward, pause, stop etc. type of options.
So far I really only have one thing negative to report about this product. When using the speakers, the volume doesn’t go up nearly high enough for video content. To give you an example - on speaker (e.g. out loud) I have the volume set to “20″ – the highest setting and sometimes struggle to hear what is being said. If I switch to headphones I have it set as about “6″ and that is bordering on loud. So the headphones are much more effective than the speakers. This is not a problem if you really like using headphones and if you are only viewing the content on your own. But if you wanted to use the player and have someone else watch a show with you I think it could get a little annoying.
Rating: 
