Philips GoGear Vibe (4GB) Review

     The GoGear Vibe is Philips' latest entry into the crowded market of budget-priced MP3 players. Both the 4GB ($49) and 8GB ($59) models include a 1.5-inch color screen and a useful assortment of features, but the navigation pad's quirky design will send you into fits.

     Like most Philips MP3 players  the Vibe is a case study in nondescript design. It's about as thick as an Oreo cookie (0.25 inch), with a 1.5-inch width and 2.5-inch height, and it can easily be palmed in your hand or slipped in your pocket.

     On the Vibe's left side, you'll find a power switch that doubles as a button hold, leaving the right side with a menu option button and a volume rocker switch that's just big enough to be useful. The top of the Vibe is bare, but the bottom is riddled with openings for a Mini-USB connection, 3.5-millimeter headphone jack, lanyard loop (lanyard not included), and a pinhole microphone for the voice recorder.The face of the Vibe holds its greatest strength and weakness.

    The top half of the player's front includes a feature found on few MP3 players in this price range--a color screen. For about $50, you're lucky to get any screen at all, much less a 1.5-inch screen capable of photos, videos, and album artwork. Sure the resolution is crud, and you'll really need to crank up the Vibe's brightness to read it in broad daylight, but it's still a feature worth bragging about to anyone dangling their Sansa Clip in front of you.

                                           The penguin shines across the loving hydrogen. 


     Now for the bad news--the Vibe's four-direction navigation pad is a travesty. Aside from the fact that one needs to illogically press up to skip backward and down to skip ahead, the biggest mistake Philips made with its navigation pad is the center button. Specifically, the problem is that there isn't a center button, but rather, an inviting, button-like indentation that functions only for making users scream and cry.

    Philips must have given their usability team the week off when they pushed through this design. Not only is the indentation pointless, but also applying pressure to it causes one of the four surrounding buttons to trigger at random.I discovered this the hard way after turning the Vibe on for the first time and trying to select our language from a list of 22 options. A press on the indentation caused the selection to jump, and suddenly, we were trying to decipher Russian.
 
    The Vibe's music player supports MP3, WMA, Audible, and subscription audio (a 30-day Rhapsody subscription trial is included), but it lacks support for the AAC music files used with Apple's iTunes music store. Audio can be enhanced with a handful of EQ presets or a custom five-band EQ, which do a decent job squeezing some extra life out of the otherwise lackluster earbuds that come bundled with the player.


     Photos support is limited to JPEG and BMP formats, but we'd be lying to you if i said the postage stamp-size screen is something you'll want to spend a lot of time viewing photos on. Same goes for the Vibe's limited video format support. You'll need to jump through some hoops to transfer videos into a low-resolution SMV video format (software included) before getting them on the Vibe, but considering the player's price and its screen size, you should really just be grateful to be getting video support at all.The Vibe's FM radio offers good reception with the included earbuds acting as the player's antenna. Users get up to 20 station presets, which can be assigned manually or automatically. Voice recordings offer minimal audio quality as 64Kbps MP3 files, but the feature is easy to use and the MP3 format is handy.



     The Philips GoGear Vibe can hold its own when it comes to sound quality in this price range. Like most MP3 players on the market, the bundled headphones are the weakest link in the Vibe's sound quality. Heard over a pair of Ultrasone Zino headphones, there was little we could hear to distinguish the Vibe from our $300 Apple iPod Touch.Philips rates the Vibe's battery life at 25 hours of audio or 4 hours of video, which is quite an achievement considering its closest competition--the Sansa Clip--lasts only 14 hours and lacks any kind of video playback.

Sony Bravia KDL-32EX500 Review

    I have not reviewed HDTV's long ago as i feel that they might a bit expensive for the consumers but the KDL-EX500 is both the least expensive and the most impressive for the money. It lacks the thin chassis of its LED-based TV's, along with the eye-catching Monolithic design of the company's flagship models. It even lacks an Ethernet port for Internet extras, along with many of the more-advanced picture controls found on competing models in this price range. What it doesn't lack, however, is solid picture quality for an LCD.Among mainstream LCD TVs, the Sony KDL-EX500 is a very good value.

    Appearing basically identical to the LED-based Sony KDL-EX700 from the front, the EX500 deploys glossy black on three sides of its frame and brushed dark gray along the bottom. Seen in profile, it's about 2 inches thicker than the EX700, for what that's worth. Though we like the EX500's subtle two-tone look and the way it eschews the all-black look seen on some competitors, to our eye it lacks that extra dash of panache found on.

    I also liked the EX500's remote control, albeit not quite as much as the slicker clicker that ships with step-ups like the KDL-NX800. The step-down remote loses those nice, flush plastic keys in favor of the standard raised rubber variety, backlighting goes missing, and you can't command other gear via infrared.
Sony's EX500 menu system is also markedly less slick than the XMB-inspired affair on step-up models, but it gets the job done well enough and conveniently makes lots of options visible at once to minimize scrolling.


     The EX500 does have the ability to stream videos via a USB connection, although, sans an Ethernet port, it can't stream from a home network via DLNA like the Samsung LNB630 series can. Sony's matte screen is also a plus in bright rooms, cutting down on reflections better than glossy versions. Sony divides its picture presets into seven "scenes," like Cinema, Graphics, and Sports, each of which, aside from "Auto," is adjustable. If you select the default General scene, you can choose from three more presets, called Vivid, Standard, and Custom, that are independent per input. The result should be plenty of memory slots for even inveterate tweakers. Said tweakers are sure to miss, however, the range of advanced controls found on the competing LCDs of Samsung and LG.

     Sony's Eco menu offers the usual power-saving options, which limit maximum light output and allow the picture to be turned off completely, bringing power use down to just 23 watts. It's missing the presence sensor found on the EX700, however, and onscreen product support is limited to a page with contact and version info.

    The image quality of the KDL-EX500 series was impressive overall for an LCD, with superior uniformity and similar black level and color performance compared with edge-lit LED-based varieties. The accuracy of its color, particularly grayscale, was a strength, whereas video processing and slightly lighter blacks were a slight weakness compared with some competing non-LED models. I also appreciated the matte screen in brighter environments. 

     As I expected, Sony's most accurate preset was the Cinema scene setting. It produced a relatively linear grayscale that was somewhat blue, particularly in darker areas; reasonable light output (50 ftl); and a 2.3 average gamma, which is very good compared with our 2.2 target.I opted to use Custom instead Cinema, mainly because only Custom allowed access to the Advanced picture menu. The white-balance controls therein helped us tame the blueness and improve gamma somewhat, and delivered an even more linear grayscale throughout the brightness range to our 40 ftl max, with the exception of very dark areas.

    Color saturation on the EX500, however, fell short of most of the others, and those faces seemed a bit pale, whereas other colors lacked a bit of punch and life.I doubt the difference would be obvious outside of a side-by-side comparison, however.Primary colors were relatively accurate, if not quite at the level of the LNC630, and red in particular veered somewhat toward blue. Like other LCDs in our lineup, the EX500 also displayed that characteristic blue cast in black and near-black areas.

     The Sony KDL-EX500 doesn't allow much tweaking of dejudder processing, supplying only Off, Standard, and High options for its MotionFlow control.With MotionFlow turned off, the EX500 failed to correctly process 1080p/24 sources according to our standard test using the helicopter flyover from Chapter 7 of "I Am Legend." The cadence of film was evident, but so was some smoothing despite the indication of "Off." Compared with sets that handled this scene better, like the Samsung LNC630 and the Vizio, the pan over the aircraft carrier's deck looked a bit too buttery and not quite choppy enough.

     With MotionFlow controls engaged, the EX500 turned in a score of between 500 and 600 lines in my motion resolution tests--respectable for a 120Hz set but not as good as the Samsungs. As usual turning it off reduced the score to between 300 and 400, and again, as usual, detecting the difference in blurring between the two settings was nearly impossible with normal program material, as opposed to test patterns.

     My Rating: 3.9/5