It's pretty clear that Philips has the Apple iPod nano in its sights with the GoGear Opus. Both players offer video and music playback, come in 8GB and 16GB versions, and are small enough to comfortably fit in a shirt pocket. Philips, however, has packed a couple of useful extras into the Opus, including the ability to record music from the built-in FM tuner. The Opus is also slightly cheaper than the nano, with the 8GB model priced around £100, and the 16GB version costing about £135.
Functional design
The Opus is basically a slightly re-engineered version of last year's SA5285. Design-wise, it's pretty difficult to tell them apart. Both have the same glossy black and silver colour scheme, the same 71mm (2.8-inch) screen, and a similar d-pad control mechanism. Unfortunately, the side-mounted headphone jack also remains. It has a tendency to snag when you're moving the player in and out of your pocket -- a top-mounted jack would have been a much better idea. The design is fairly functional, but isn't as slick or desirable as that of the nano.
Sluggish menus
Surprisingly, the player is rather slow to start up, but, once it kicks into gear, its menu system is relatively easy to navigate. Fast navigation is difficult, however, because of the constant clicking of the d-pad that's required. Compared to the speedy touch controls on other players, like the nano, it's a frustratingly slow system.
Also, the menu system itself isn't as zippy as we'd have liked. For example, the sluggishness with which it loads the tiny thumbnails in the album-art mode is so annoying that you're unlikely to make much use of this feature.
The player comes with in-ear, sound-isolating headphones, supplied with three differently sized earpieces, so, no matter what size lugholes you have, you should be able to get them to fit snugly. The headphones are pretty good, handling the deep bass and clinical high frequencies of dance tracks with ease. With acoustic material, however, the mid range has a tendency to sound rather brittle, and less smooth and natural than we'd have liked.
Good for iPlayer
Like most of today's players, the Opus supports video. Videos are limited to the MP4 and WMV 9 formats with a maximum resolution of 320x240 pixels, but the big benefit of this model over some of its rivals is that it can be used to watch shows downloaded from the BBC's iPlayer service. Downloaded videos play smoothly, but the Opus' screen isn't brilliant -- it tends to look slightly smeary and isn't as bright as the displays on rival devices.
To go with the video playback, you also get a photo viewer. This has pretty basic functionality, however. You can rotate pictures and create slideshows from them, but you can't zoom in or out, and snaps suffer from the same problems as video on the Opus' less than impressive display.
On the plus side, the player does have an FM tuner, which got pretty good reception around London during our test period. We also like the fact that you can also use the player to record from radio.
Like Apple, Philips no longer supplies a charger with the player, so you're left relying on your computer's USB port for filling it with juice. Annoyingly, the USB lead that Philips supplies is ridiculously short, at around a foot long. It's fine for laptops, but, if you keep your PC unit under a desk, you'll find it's nowhere near long enough to reach from a desk to the PC underneath. That said, once the player is charged, battery life isn't too bad. It's good for around 30 hours of audio playback and 6 hours of video playback.
Conclusion
The Philips GoGear Opus isn't a bad little player, but it's not a great one either. We like the iPlayer support and FM radio recording, but it's let down by its relatively poor screen and sluggish menu system. Overall, it's not really a match for more stylish players like the iPod nano and Sony NWZ-S639F.
Edited by Charles Kloet
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elevation 1 July 2009
Good: Improved support and tons of space
Bad: Headphone jack location
Comment: Having owned the 8Gb, SA6185 model of the GoGear I was waiting ever since Philips made the press release on 20th February this year to finally get my hands on this baby. Finally, and after a couple of delays, I have myself a brand new player, and I could not be happier. The menus respond noticeably faster than the 6185 I had before, and are quick to navigate through. Forget about silly fads like touchscreen. I mostly use mine in bed, in the dark. What use is touch screen when you aren't even looking at the player? Buttons will always be more practical, and also mean you won't end up with a player resembling the underneath of a chip pan through endless greasy paw prints slapped all over it. Something to think about before being taken in by the "OOOH touchscreen!" novelty-marketing.
My previous 6185 player failed to let me down a single time, and is still working now. The reason I bought this upgrade is partly the Fullsound and also the AAC support, which means I can now start buying Audible audiobooks for my player, which was previously un-supported by it's software. The FullSound is no gimmick. There's no shockingly awe-inspiring difference between FullSound and the normal, and consistantly highly praised sound quality, but overall it does manage to pick out the finite detail of background noise in the podcasts I listen to, more so than the normal sound setting. Despite this fact, Philips give you a large number of alternative sound settings, including one for "Spoken word" which is perfect for me.
I did purchase the previous version of the GoGear, the 5185. However I had 3 gripes about it - the lcd screen was far too weak, in that I only happened to press lightly on it accidentally one time and I caused ripples on the display. Secondly the volume control was very flimsy and cheap feeling - a let down as it's a very often used control with differing recorded volume levels of various podcasts. Finally in screensaver mode, the previous player seemed to interpret "off" as "turn the player off" - so there I was listening to my Star Wars play when suddenly Luke would be cut off in his prime. I'm very happy that Philips seem to have read my mind and addressed ALL 3 of these gripes.
Sadly however they have stubbornly kept the headphone jack on the side of the player which looks out of place compared to the 6185 version which is on the end.
Customisation is limited, unlike the Zen, for example, you can't have a background 'desktop' of your choice. But the menus are flashy enough for me not to mind that at all. You can choose the 'dark' setting, 'light' setting or "Red" for the menu displays. Quite who in their wisdom decided that red is the universally favoured colour for all mankind is perhaps worth investigating. At the moment I opt for dark, which is very stylish, and the light option resembles the display of my previous player, which makes me all nostalgic and fuzzy inside.
Every single reviewer in existance will compare anything any company producing mp3/4 players to iPods. Some of us less-than-doe eyed Apple fanboys however realise all iPods amount to are overpriced, slick looking, flawed products which are so shoddily put together they have to release replacements every few months. However true this may be, the masses unfortunately are generally swayed by a very well funded marketing machine, which will always put this Philips player at a disadvantage.
Personally I take practicality over marketing hype any day. What use is something that matches your socks, but gets superceded every 4 months.
If you want a shoddy, rushed out fashion accessory, by all means go for an iPod. If however you want something a little bit more reliable and of superior quality, that just will not let you down, a GoGear is definitely the choice for you.
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