Philips Nike PSA 256 Max

Author's product rating:   

Sound Quality	Good
Ease of Use	Simple
Look & Design	Excellent
Range of Features	Limited
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Tiny form factor, simple operation .
Disadvantages:	Expensive, maybe a little "too" simple .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

The first thing you notice about this little player is the way it looks. In my mind, the word for that is "fantastic." I'm a huge fan of nicely designed hardware (as anyone could tell by now, considering my glowing comments about the iPod . . .) and this is certainly a nice piece of work. It has a sporty look to it (appropriate considering it bears the Nike "swoosh,") and is rubbery in all the right places. It pretty much looks like all the other PSA players (I like their design too!) but, like the 128MAX, it has an LCD which is critical. Some of the earlier models of this type had no display on them (REALLY no frills . . .) and that was a deal-breaker for me. I'm way to obsessive to go without any kind of display (more about the display later, as right now I'm only addressing appearance.)

The other great thing about this device is that it is extremely lightweight. It comes with an armband, and I think it's the first MP3 player I've ever seen that would actually be comfortable strapped to one's arm. This thing is so small and lightweight, you can stick it just about anywhere and then forget about it. Very Nice.

The design as it pertains to it's actual use is, in some ways, very clever. The buttons are a little small and hard to depress at times, but not too hard to get used to. There's only four of them, and they surround the LCD under the rubber housing. They don't seem to get pressed accidentally, and because of the rubber housing, I don't worry too much about handling them when sweaty. Another clever touch is the USB connection - the port is under the battery cover, so when the unit is closed up, there's no exposed ports at all. This adds to the smooth aesthetic of the unit as well as protecting the port. Speaking of batteries, the thing runs on one AAA (I'm not sure precisely how long yet, but I think it's supposed to be about 10h.)

As far as features go, this thing is absolutely minimal, which has it's good and bad points. When you plug it into a USB port, it simply shows up as a removable drive. You then drag up to 256Mb of .mp3s over to it and you're good to go. In many ways, this is fantastic. One, there's no cumbersome software to transfer files. Two, you could use it as a 256Mb portable drive if you want. You also don't have to worry about drivers on any modern Windows system, so you can just plug it in to any available USB, grab files and start listening. One bad side is that you have to do everything manually - such as numbering your filenames if you want to play your music in any particular order. Geeks like me think that's fun, but I can imagine some people finding that irritating. Also, because of it only using the Explorer interface, I'm not quite sure how the ID3 tag part is supposed to work out. I know that it uses them, because I loaded an .mp3 with a filename and no ID3 info, and it just came up on the LCD as "Track One," so I guess you'll need another application to manage tags (Musicmatch comes on the included CD.)