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In association with Amazonaws.com
Rating:  - Good, but not as good as I first thought - now three starsI have been looking for a travel alarm with MP3 and good sound for a couple years, here it is - almost. The good: Firmware upgrade improved functionality greatly - hopefully more to come Nice package, right size. About 7.5" X 2" X 2". Rechargeable battery - and long playing on a charge. Amazing sound for the 1.2" drivers and small case. Logical controls. Flexible alarm features - once, weekdays, daily. Snooze. Soft on. ********** SEE BELOW!!! Wake to music (selection), alarm, or radio. Aux input. Case, charger/adapter and cords included. The bad: Although the sound is very impressive for the size it still lacks bass below 80HZ. No subwoofer-only output jack. Have to use pc software to load and catalog rather than simple MP3 file transfer. Slow download. Setup text too small. The AC clock should show alarm indicator and time and should have adjustable brightness - is too bright for nightstand. The worse: Just 256k with no known way to add more memory. Conclusion: Philips, great job, but add storage, provide an optional travel subwoolfer (or at least a sub output), keep improving the functionality through the firmware upgrades, loose the pc software interface, FIX THE ALARM TO ALLOW VOLUME ADJUST and you get 5 stars. Followup after a couple months use: A MOST ANNOYING non-feature is how the alarm functions. You can set a play list to be awakened to. Fine. When the alarm goes off it starts low and increases quickly to LOUDER THAN YOU EVER WANTED AND LOUNDER THAN YOU LAST OR EVER PLAYED IT. YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING AND WHEN YOU TOUCH IT TO TURN IT DOWN it shuts off completely. You have been awakened and then BLASTED BY YOUR FAVORITE SONG AND NOW IT IS. . . . . . gone. When you turn it back on, your selection is lost which leaves you to either listen to the default every *$^%ing morning OR to use 4 different buttons and the small screen all bleary-eyed to reselect the play list. Rating: - The little boombox that could...well sorta.I purchased this product because I'm looking for something that I can use while in the bathroom/shower in the morning. Normal shower radios always sound awful and most don't have MP3 capability. Obviously I can't take this unit into the shower, but it takes up very little space and I can set it near the shower without any problem. First the good: 1. This unit sounds really good for what it is. It's not going to compete with your stereo system, but the sound is clean and crisp. It's also very loud when you turn the volume all the way up. Easily loud enough to accommodate a midsize room. It sounds better by far, than any other speaker I've heard that is a similar size. 2. It has a rechargable battery, with a life of about 10 hours. Some people may see this as a liability, but I hate changing batteries all the time so I like it. 3. This thing makes a very passable alarm clock. Some of the other comments knock this feature, however, after upgrading the firmware many of the problems go away. After upgrading the firmware, you can choose which song the alarm plays. Also hitting any button engages a 10 minute snooze. Hitting a button while it snoozes turns off the alarm. I'd even consider using it as a replacement for my current clock radio, and then taking it with me while I get ready. 4. The unit got great radio reception for me. I know some people had problems with this, but after I attached the included antenna, I was able to receive a lot of different stations. I suppose other's mileage will vary. Unfortunately, the unit has has some real limitations which as a result caused me to return it. 1. It's only USB 1.1. It takes quite a while to fill the device. I do not understand why they didn't go USB 2.0 on this. Basically, if you add the full 256 MB of music, you might as well go get some coffee while it loads. 2. It only works, officially, with the included musicmatch software. Since I run Linux, this software is no good for me. I was able to get this to work using a third party software package named pyGogear: http://freshmeat.net/projects/pygogear/ This software manipulates the SQLite database which the unit uses to access the playlists and what not. It has no GUI and certainly is not for the faint of heart, however. I don't understand why they didn't make it so that you can just copy the tracks on. Granted you may not get the ID3 taginfo (this is my guess as to why they didn't do it) and hence song navigation by artist, album, etc; but it could still just play the music and maybe list the filename. 3. It has no expansion capabilities. An included flash reader seems like it'd be a no brainer to me. 4. This one is the biggy...It's only 256 MB. I knew this going in, thought I could make it work, but I couldn't. It simply is not enough capacity. It takes so long to transfer music to the device, making it painful to change the track selection often. I thought maybe I could bear re-encoding my MP3s to 48 or 64 kb/s, to get a larger selection on the unit but I couldn't. They simply sound too horrible at the lower bitrates, particularly through this device which sounds pretty good with higher bitrates. WMA isn't much of an option for me because I run Linux. In short, I really wanted to like this unit. I do like this unit. It's so close to amazing (you have to hear it)...If Philips releases another one that uses a microdrive (a few gig capacity) with usb 2.0, or uses a flash reader (this would be optimal); I'd totally buy it, keep it, and give it 5 stars. Rating: - Smallest / Loudest "boombox" ever madeI bought this little gadget as an alternative to dragging around a huge regular sized boombox to the beach, picnic, or pool. I thought I would be sacrificing volume and sound quality because of its size, but I couldn't be more wrong. If you need portable amplified audio for anything, this is it. You have to hear this thing to believe it. I have no idea how Philips figured out a way to get this much volume and bass from such a small housing. It easily plays loud enough to fill a whole room with good sounding music. Basically its an MP3 player / radio with built in amplified speakers. It feels durable and solid. Small plastic "fins" help protect the speakers from probing fingers without any sound quality loss. I never use the radio because reception for the stations I listen to are generally bad. Ever notice how only crappy radio stations you don't listen to come in clear? The mp3 player holds about 40-50 songs and the battery will last about 8-10 hours. That's the main advantage of the PSS110, portable music with hours of entertainment. My average time on a regular portable boombox was about 1-2 hours and thats with 8 D batteries which can get expensive. The full range sound quality is very good almost all the way to max volume. Once you hit max though, it will tend to distort on anything bass heavy (like most audio equipment). I've never had to max out the volume becuase it gets pretty loud before you reach full volume. The mp3 player menu really feels like they copied iPods design scheme. It's visually friendly and easy to navigate. The really cool feature with this product is the audio INPUT. If you have another larger capacity mp3 player or game system, you can plug it in for amplified sound. My only complaint is the really lame MusicMatch software that is required for you to put songs on the player. It's very, very slow and not intuitive at all. The simple drag and drop format that most flash players have doesn't work here. Even grabbing songs already on the player and re-arranging the order they play in takes about 10 seconds per move. Over all, the benefits greatly outweigh the problems. I would recommend this player for anybody who wants convenient and portable music you can take anywhere. Rating:  - banana-sized boomboxI bought this as a temporary solution for my daughter whose car stereo was broken. It's hard to believe how much volume comes out of this banana-sized device which is actually high volume speakers -- and it even has a 256mb MP3 player and FM (although the reception isn't that great). It's so small you'd never guess it was speakers loud enough to play audio in a car (over the road noise etc.). It's like a boombox in a mini-umbrella sized case. I'm just really impressed.
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