Philips' SA9345 is a new member of the Streamium family of audio products from the Netherlands-based company. It emerges into an incredibly competitive market dominated by Apple's iPod. With prices hovering around the £129 mark, the same as a brand new video iPod nano, we're hoping for a solid competitor.
Design
While the face of the lightweight SA9345 is finished in a glossy black, the rest of the silver-trimmed body has a stylish brushed charcoal look. The player's touch-sensitive controls live underneath the player's screen and glow with an attractive blue when touched -- certain functions light up only when they can be used within a given menu.
The downside to the glossy allure of the SA9345 is that it'll memorise your fingerprints in new and exciting detail. This is an issue most touch-sensitive or touchscreen handhelds suffer from and Philips' new model is no exception.
A très-handy menu button brings up context menus for each of the player's various modes. There's no button to return to the main menu though -- you need to cycle backwards through each menu to return home. Power and volume controls come in the form of physical buttons, each sitting on the left and right of the player respectively.
The 46mm (1.8-inch) colour LCD display has a resolution of 220x176 pixels -- lower than the iPod nano's sharp 51mm (2-inch) 320x240-pixel screen. The use of mostly blue on black backgrounds doesn't give the screen a wholly bright appearance, but it's easy to read and serves its purpose well.
Features
You'll be pleased to know this audio player plays MP3 and WMA files, protected and unprotected, but perhaps less pleased to know format support ends here -- no AAC, no WAV and no OGG or FLAC either. Videos in WMV format will play back quite happily as long as resolutions don't exceed the 220x176-pixel resolution and 376Kbps limitation. Supplied software handles file conversion for you. For photos, simple JPEG files are supported.
Music is sorted in the typical artist>album>song structure or you can browse by album art, the latter sorted in 3x3 grids of 8x8mm colour thumbnails. Playlists can be made on-the-fly from the context menu available in the 'now playing' screen. A 'Superscroll' function allows you to brush your finger down the vertical scroll strip, letting you fly down a list of hundreds of artists or songs in seconds. Very neat.
Finally, there's a simple built-in FM radio capable of storing 20 presets and a photo gallery, complete with thumbnail browsing and slideshow options.
Android App 
RSS Feeds 
iPhone App 
Newsletters
User reviews1
Add your review
sonymad 7 March 2012
Good: Sound quality Design Weight Intuitive navigation and controls FM radio
Bad: Price Short list of codec support Low-res screen for a video player
Comment: The Philips SA9345 is a great-looking digital audio and video player that’s easy to navigate and boasts an FM tuner, which is always a plus.
RELATED ARTICLES
Philips SHQ4000 review
Group test: what's the best MP3 player?
Philips SA3125/02 2GB media player
Philips GoGear Connect Android media player
Philips Go Gear SA9345
In common with Apple's iPods, navigating the Philips SA9345 requires the lightest of touches and benefits from a straightforward menu structure. Plus you can listen to DRM-protected content you’ve bought through any PlaysForSure online store.
Get the best price for the Philips SA9345 here
Philips’ relatively low capacity new MP4 players (there’s a 2GB model available too) use the same touch-sensitive navigation that caught our imagination on its hard-disk-based Philips 6320 a couple of years ago. The company continues to sell players with navipad controls, but we’re sold on delicately scrolling through playlists with a gentle stroke. You’re rewarded with a flowing blue LED lighting up in response.
The Philips SA9345 offers 4GB of storage for your media files. Philips reckons up to 2,000 Windows Media Audio (WMA) tracks can be housed on it, but most people are likely to have heaps of MP3 tracks they want to listen to and these tend to be sampled at higher bitrates.
Given the Philips SA9345’s good range of audio preset options and customisable equaliser, it would be a shame not to use the top sampling rate of 192K.
As a Windows Media Player-focused player, with the Philips SA9345 you just drag items to the Sync list and star ratings, musical genre, album art and other details are imported along with the music file itself.
Other players – notably the Archos 405 – support more video and audio formats than this model and you get superior video playback on the Sony as well as both the iPod touch and the nano.
Philips needs to up the 1.8in display’s resolution to the 240x320 pixels of its rivals, while the Philips SA9345's 30fps (frames per second) playback is standard.
As a piece of design the Philips SA9345 puts in a strong showing. As well as the excellent and classy touchscreen, the slim metal casing with the translucent black fascia looks great. You do of course have to put up with fingerprint smears, but the same is true of the iPod touch.
See all user reviews