Philips GoGear Aria (8GB, black)

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Philips GoGear Aria

The Philips tradition of making useful, affordable, and wholly unremarkable MP3 players marches forward with the GoGear Aria. This solid little player isn't going to impress you with fancy features, but it is competitively priced at $79 (8GB) and $99 (16GB).

Design
Nearly all of Philips MP3 players over the past four years have shared the same design attributes: curved bodies, glossy coatings, and an unflinching attachment to black and gray plastic. The only rogue element thrown onto the Aria is a unique navigation control design that nests a play button within a metallic scroll switch, which is in turn nested within a four-direction navigation pad. The new addition looks a whole lot more interesting than the traditional navigation Philips has used on models like the SA6185, or the SA6045, but from a practical point of view it's a small step backwards. For all of the navigation pad's visual elegance, its operation is no more intuitive than on older models and the Play button has shrunk down to an awkward tic-tac size. Adding to the frustration is the fact that the Play button pulls double duty as an Enter key, so you have to use it every time you need to dive into a menu or make any kind of selection.

The navigation also feels odd while browsing photos, as Philips decided to use the left and right keys for rotating images instead of advancing through images. Flipping through photos using the vertical rocker switch works fine, but we found it hard to resist our instinct to use the horizontal buttons. Inevitably, we'd relapse into our old ways and watch as our photos somersaulted around the screen.

Features
Considering its price, the Aria scores decent marks when it comes to features. All the standards are here, such as music, video, photo, radio, voice, and text. The features that distinguish the Aria, however, are the 2-inch color screen (220 x 176 resolution), Rhapsody subscription music DNA, and a quality pair of in-ear headphones.

Users of Rhapsody's subscription music service will be happy to see features such as a Rhapsody Channels menu and a renewal indicator, but otherwise, nonsubscribers will have to content themselves with the Aria's relatively basic music player. Compared with an MP3 player like the SanDisk Sansa Fuze, which supports formats such as FLAC, Ogg, and WAV, the Aria is quite limited, supporting just MP3 and WMA. If you've been ripping and downloading your music as AAC files using a program like iTunes, you're not going to be able to transfer those songs to the Aria without converting them first.

The Aria's video player is similarly limited, playing only SMV files encoded at a 200 x 176 resolution. Expect that any video you'll want to play on the Aria will need to get shoehorned onto the player using the included software and a dash of patience.

Performance
Philips rates the Aria's battery life at 30 hours of music playback and 6 hours of video, which is a little better than you'd get from an Apple iPod Nano, and right in line with budget-priced competitor the Sansa Fuze. Battery testing in CNET Labs found the Aria averaging 26 hours of continuous audio playback and a surprising 9 hours of video. Unfortunately, video picture quality is pretty crummy, but from an audio perspective, the Aria's combination of EQ, Full Sound audio enhancement, and above-average earbuds offers some of the best out-of-the-box fidelity you'll get in this price range.

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