Buy Now...

Some of you may have read my previous article on the Philips Expanium 300 CD/MP3 player. On the whole I thought the product was very good, although not perfect. I'm probably not an ideal customer for this kind of product, one of the main usages I have is during running and CD players have been known to skip! For the most part the 300 could keep up with me. It helped once I'd arranged the carry it in a hip stapped bag that didn't move too much, and where most of the movement was in line with the moving head in the player.  These things fo have big anti-skip buffers so it is to be expected that they will work!

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A solid state device is probably much more suitable - but the capacity is still dar too low. Something like the iPod would be great, but at £300 I'm not about to be rushing out to buy one just yet.

I also noted that fairly early in it's life I'd managed to drop the player, onto a hard surface, and that it had never quite been the same. Ad a certain point on the disk (about 2/3 of the way through) the motor would make lots of whirling noises and it would give up.

I spot this device in Dixons while walking around looking for Chrissie presents. Much prettier than my first one - and at about half the price (£59 I think) a bit of a snip. I bought it - took it home and great. The display is nice - this time include album name and track name (the 300 only displayed album and track *number* - useless when my favourites CD mix has extract from 52 albums on it!

Great start!

Next thing was to try running! I duly strapped the Expanium to my body - inserted earplugs and set off down the road at a moderate pace. Worked fine for a couple of minutes! Then it started doing some very strange things - obviously skipping but in a much different way to the old Expanium. Previously the old player would start whirling for a while - maybe start playing again but occassionally give up with the word "oops" on it's display. Not the new 320! Obviously improved software - some engineers have been having fun.

The new algorithm seems to try to keep reading blocks of music - and when it gets one it 'seemlessly' merges it onto the end of whatever the last block was. The result is enough to put any runner of their stride. Once it's done this a few times within a track - it decides to skip to the next track. This seems to go OK for a while (I think this is the 100sec 'magic' skip protection being used) then the same thing will happen. And it does it a *lot* more than the old player.

Not wanting to be overly critical - I gave the player the benefit of the doubt first time out. With the old player I'd had to find the best position for it by rotatiing it around various angles so the shock of my feet hitting the ground moved the heads as little as possible. I've had this player a couple of months now and used it running on a number of occassions. It has got better as I've adjusted it's position, but to be honest it's still no where as resilient as the old player.

I'm now for much of the time back to using my old Expanium 300 during exercise - this new player being kept indoors away from any serious shocks! Seems to work fine in those situations.

I feel very disappointed with this machine - one expects successive devices in a product family to be improvements on the previous - this player isn't in a very fundamental way.

I've since noticed another player in this series that has a 420 second skip protection - a tacit admission from Philips that they've got it wrong? I won't be buying that one!

Sorry Philips - you've made a mistake with this player from my perspective.