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48 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
Good Sound Quality & Overall Value
By techdad review
The very basi portable MP3 players were introduced in 1998 but didn't genuinely catch on en masse until Apple freed the iPod in late 2001. Apple chose to use their own audio compression (AAC), which had better sound quality than MP3. Apple's iPods are ubiquitous now with portable music players but believe it or not, there are other music players that offer features equivalent to those of or better than the iPod. Philips offers the GoGear ViBE as an substitute to the iPod nano by likeable to one very necessary consideration: value.
PROS:
- Very good value
- Good user interface
- Good sound quality
- Good battery life
- Supports MP3, WMA, and FLAC formats
- Firmware upgradeable
- Decent FM reception
CONS:
- FullSound "feature" is a gimmick
- Songbird application is weak
- Cannot update firmware without Songbird
- Terrible 90-day warranty
- Earbuds are awful
Back in 1998, I purchased the Diamond Rio PMP300, which is ofttimes incorrectly credited with being the original MP3 player ever made (it was the 2nd), for regarding $200. It only had 32MB of space and employed a parallel port cable to transfer music. I had been using l3enc, a command line encoder, a few years earlier to compress my CDs and listen to them on my PC. Having a portable was a godsend. Fast forward 12 years and wowie zowie! I myself have never owned an Apple iPod. I never found it to do anything much better than the plethora of other music players available and was distinctively far more highpriced while relying on proprietary cables. The Philips GoGear ViBE is one of those other players that does just in regards to everything an iPod may do at an MSRP Steve Jobs would fire an Apple employee for even suggesting.
SOUND QUALITY
I personally found the sound quality of the GoGear ViBE to be very good. It's signal-to-noise symmetry is very good equated to that of other high quality music players. I did an A-B comparison with a SanDisk Sansa CLIP+ player. The CLIP+ is considered by some audiophiles to have one of the best audio chips in a portable music player so it made an idealisti measuring stick for the ViBE. I used various FLAC files as well as Lame VBR uttermost files for my comparison. I likewise used an Etymotic hf5 audiophile earphone and tossed the terrible included earbuds. I have to candidly say that the deviations were very subtle. While I personally still preferent the SanDisk's sound quality overall, the Philips GoGear was no slouch. However, the FullSound feature actually is a gimmick. It's basically just another EQ preset to me and it genuinely boosted the lows but caused undesirable distortion in the mids and highs. You are better off using the included 5 band equalizer and setting your own habit setting or leaving it flat, which is my preference. If lazy, you may also select one of various presets available as well. I also in truth liked the volume limit feature because it will support me keep it at safe level for my kids when they use it.
USABILITY/SCREEN
I found the interface of the ViBE to be very easy to use and the sceen was easy to read. The navigation controls are on the front of the player. It simulates a typical d-pad style layout altho the directional buttons took a few tries to get used to. Additionally, there are two buttons just beneath the screen. One of those buttons is a return button while the other provides choices depending on which feature of the player you are presently using. The volume up/down buttons are on the top of the player and aren't as easy to press. I probably would've preferent a volume dial at that location. There are no buttons on either side of the player. The bottom of the player has the USB and headphone ports along with the power/lock switch and mic. I found no issues with the headphone port as reported by another reviewer. My earphones and the included earbuds plugged in with resolute determination and stayed in. Twisting the connector around in the jack did not cause any static whatsoever. The 1.5" screen is easy to read and you have 3 color-based theme choices. Though the demo video and photos looked pretty nice and could double as a photo/video viewer in a pinch, it is actually too little for regular use and more disturb than it's worth, particularly for video. One thing I didn't like too much in regards to the screen was how it uses album art as the background while playing songs. Some album art didn't make outstanding backgrounds because it at times made the text (song title, album, artist, time, etc.) difficult to read.
FM TUNER
I seldom have had good luck with FM tuners that were built-in to my gimmicks so I was enjoyably astonished when the GoGear ViBE genuinely got good reception. It pulled in stations better than my SanDisk Sansa CLIP+. It also supports RDS, which may display info like the station ID, song title, and artists. You're permitted 20 presets and the autotune feature worked pretty well and it scanned all the frequencies before selecting the 20 strongest.
CHARGING/BATTERY LIFE
The battery life indicator was at 2 out of 4 bars when I basi turned it on. I plugged it into my PC using the 6 inch or so mini-USB cable and it took another couple of hours to reach a full charge. I actually preferent the little USB cable because I occur to have a box full of longer mini-USB cables from a assortment of other gadgets I own including digital cameras and Blackberries. Unfortunately, you are fixed to charging only thru a powered USB port from a computer as no AC adapter is included. This could be a problem if you determine to travel with the GoGear ViBE without a laptop but there are a lot of universal USB chargers available these days. I myself may just take my old Blackberry charger along, must the need arise. The ranked battery life is 24 hours of audio but that is in all likelihood with all the battery saving features set at aggressive levels. It's likewise likely that sure audio codecs like FLAC will also drain more power. If I may get 75% of the rated life (18hrs) then I'll be very happy. One neat battery save feature is to have the screen shut off after a amount of time of time but you may choose to display the date and time. I've only seen this work with the music player. In FM mode, the screen just blanks out.
AUDIOBOOK
I'm not an experienced audiobook listener, but decisive to get Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol since I hadn't gotten to reading the physical book. After ripping the discs, I loaded them onto the GoGear ViBE and Dan Brown showed up as an artisan and The Lost Symbol as an album. I chosen play all and it started out playing the files in order. I paused the audio and turned the player off and turned it back on to find that the player had remembered the point I had paused it. I may have found myself a new way of catching up on my reading 
SOFTWARE/FIRMWARE
The GoGear ViBE comes with a habit copy of Songbird. I tried to install it on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit computer and it gave me an error message that some features may not work correctly in my version of Windows. Come on Philips. There is no reason not to have full 32-bit and 64-bit support. It installed fine however, and I was capable to add my music to the player and use it to transfer music to the GoGear ViBE. Firmware updates are performed from within the customized version of Songbird as well. I downloaded a more current version of Songbird but the non-customized version did not have the option for updating the firmware and there is no way I know of to update it without using the included version. Boo Philips! The firmware version on my player was v1.33 and when I checked for updates, was told that was the most current. I don't care for Songbird so I chose to use Winamp. The only problem with using Winamp was that it copied the music into the root directory of the player rather than straight into the "Music" folder.
CONCLUSION
The Philips GoGear ViBE 8GB MP3 Player is a very good player with a large total of good and utile features. I found the sound quality to be good and the player very easy to use. It's adverse that Philips only provides an anemic 90-day warranty, but at least the build quality appears solid. It is a good value. If you don't need the big screen for observing album art, photos and video, I highly commend the SanDisk Sansa CLIP+ rather because of better overall sound, littler size, and elaboration capabilities. The GoGear ViBE is not the most inexpensive 8GB MP3 player you may buy, but it surely offers a very likeable feature set for the cash and I have no qualms regarding recommending it.
16 of 18 persons found the following review helpful.
Buyer Beware
By Mike
I purchased this MP3 player as a gift for Christmas for my son, but it was dead before I could give it to him. I got it out of the package to charge and put songs on it so it would be ready Christmas day. It was doing ok at first, then it said that a firmware update was available. The update caused the player to lock up. The songbird application likewise failed to carry out after that. I tried to re-launch Songbird only to get error messages. I uninstalled it and tried to re-install it... the same error messages. Philips aid was NO HELP. They suggested I get Songbird directly from the Songbird site... I did.. It installed. Now as for the player it was locked up.. I ended up having to format it again which erases all of you songs, but I figured I could re-load them. Once the player was turning on and appeared to be working order I hooked it up to the most recent Songbird application I had downloaded.. It wouldn't load the songs (errors among the player and software). I went back to support.. they said to download the Philips branded version of Songbird and it would fix the player.. The problem is that their download had the same error message which said: An error occured for the duration of the installation. Please launch the installer again to install Philips Songbird. It never does work. I have seen the same problem posted on the internet from others. There is apparently an issue with the Philips version that won't let it install if it was antecedently on the computer. Philips support said to install it on another computer... I don't have another computer, and even if I did, all of my music is on this computer. So now I have an MP3 player that is 3 days old and will not play and it can't be fixed without the Philips version of Songbird which will not install on my computer. So my son got an comprehensible statement as to why he may not use his gift and I am taking it back to the store tomorrow and get an iPod. Spend the extra cash and get a device that will work and if it doesn't will be supported by the company. I am very disappointed with this product and the support from Philips.
13 of 16 persons found the following review helpful.
Inferior sound quality, bettered menu navigation
By Gattech
Purchased this NEW Philips Vibe 8GB as backup for my other two mp3 players (earlier version 4gb Vibe and 4gb Sansa Clip+) and for the capacity to play FLAC encoded music.
Compared to the earlier version of Philips Vibe, this new one have a better and more intuitive menu navigation. The navigation pad now have the Play/Pause button in the middle. The aluminum case give it a solid, well built feel. Clearly, Philips did his homework and corrected the physical and navigation drawbacks of the old one. But they failed in another equaly essential aspect. Sound quality!
This new one sounds harsh, dull, opaque, lifeless equated to the Sansa Clip+ and older GoGear Vibe. I used the same mp3 song on all three units for and unbiased comparison. The Sansa Clip+ gives the best reproduction. The sound is lifelike, detailed, with presence and dimension. The older version of GoGear Vibe sounds more elaborate and crisp than the new Vibe but lacks the presence and dimension of the Sansa Clip+. Bass replica on both Vibes is lifeless equated to the Clip+.
Then equated a FLAC encoded song on the new Vibe and the Sansa Clip+ (the old Vibe does not decode FLAC). The Sansa Clip+ played it with the same dimension, presense and detail as the source CD. In contrast, The new Vibe played that same FLAC encoded song with a harsh, unnatural tone. Without any dimension and presence at all in sound.
Full Sound feature. This feature is suposed to retore the life and detail of music but in real world testing, I didn't found any betterment in sound. First, it disables the equalizer feature. Leaving you without any tonal adjustment. And second, I didn't noticed any sound quality betterment in the areas of detail, definition and presence. It may increase in numerous way the dynamic range but equated to the Sansa Clip+, the Vibe still sounds lifeless!
It is a pity that the new improvements have been eclipsed by the inferior sound quality.
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