Philips GoGear Muse 3 PMP

Any portable media player has to contend with the entire smartphone market. If you don’t mind running down the battery, mobiles can be as good as dedicated players. New PMPs need extra frills to stand out. With its third-generation GoGear Muse, Philips has added some interesting tweaks. But are they enough? Philips GoGear Muse …

[Bassey]

Battery life

There is no mention of how long the battery lasts. If the sole justification for buying this over, say, an Orange San Francisco (which would be cheaper, more capable, better screen etc) is to save the battery of your smartphone then would it not be useful to tell us how much music/video you can squeeze out of it?

[Andy ORourke]

Apart from "Up To 24Hr Audio, 20 Hr, Radio, 5Hr Video" in the MASSIVE box at the bottom of page 1?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Any portable media player has to contend with the entire smartphone market. If you don’t mind running down the battery, mobiles can be as good as dedicated players. "

That depends on the smartphone. If the audio and video players in it doesn't remember where you stopped playing a audiobook, podcast or movie last time and always starts at the beginning, then a PMP is better.

[Jim_aka_Jim]

65% for a "good player"?

For a tech site you do seem to have problem with math.

Rate items for how well they perform their funtion, not how they lack Apple accessories.

[Anonymous Coward]

iPod alternative

There are ample "alternatives" to an iPod at much less cost than it.

[Leigh Brown]

Re: iPod alternative

I'm looking for such a thing for my son so very interested in recommendations...

[Anonymous Coward]

Define your requirements. Without those not much point in making a recommendation. Battery life?, radio? sound quality? MP4? AAA battery or internal battery?

Sansa clip perhaps

[Liam McClean]

SD Storage

Is there a maximum size SD card that the player can take? If it can accept 32Gb cards it might be interesting. With more music files are the menus actually fast enough to be usable?

Is there a limit to the number of files that can be stored on the device? If there's a way that I can have 64Gb of space, enough to fit all my music and some videos on then I can justify the spend.

[iancalc]

The biggest SD card capacity that it accepts is 32GB. I'm not sure about the maximum number of files, that may depend on formatting, but using plenty of folders and sub-folders would probably get around any problems. The menu seems to be fast enough for long lists.

NB: typical battery life is listed at about 5hrs if using video all the time, 20hrs for radio and 24hrs for audio only (which is roughly in line with what I found when using it).

[Nimbuscat]

I have something like this player already .... a 4 year old Creative Zen Vison M with 30Gb of storage. Plays music at a very high quality (esp with Sennheiser earbuds attached - magic!), has a good equaliser, plays video with remarkable clarity,has a decent FM radio, voice recorder, can be configured for data storage.Plus, I don't need to have any special software or interface as I can just connect it to the PC and drag and drop files from Explorer ....

Only thing it can't do is make phone calls!