Philips HDD060

Meet the newest in Philips' MP3 line-up

Keeping up with this MP3 malarkey is a tricky business. One minute you're happily compiling a digital library spanning ABBA through to Zero 7; the next you're being told by the British Phonographic Institute that they'll sue you to bankruptcy for sharing an OutKast track with your friends. The current wind of change, however, affects the technology in our players - and this rinky-dink Philips is a prime example. Where smaller MP3 models have traditionally used expensive fl ash memory, this one, as well as Rio's Nitrus (T3 96, 5/5) and the iPod mini (T3 98, 5/5), use inexpensive and capacious mini hard disks. The difference? Where £150 of fl ash buys you 256MB of storage, £150 of hard drive snags you 1.5GB - room for around 750 tunes saved as Windows Media Audio.

Impressively priced, this tiny device should have been a cracker - instead, it looks more like something that came out of one. The Dutch maestro's successful first jukebox, the HDD100 (T3 90, 4/5), was a black slab worthy of gadget lust, but its little cousin is a higgledy-piggledy mess, with cheap-feeling (and cheap-looking) buttons, an odd separate fascia surrounding the screen, and an unattractive off-white finish. The designers have also thought to include so-called Groovy Stickers - dreadful brightly hued panels that you can stick onto the player's side. Apparently, Rodney and Del have extra colours available.

On the plus side, this is an easy player to use. Its interface can be a bit slow sometimes, but otherwise, navigating through several hundred tunes and concocting playlists is intuitive and hassle-free. It comes with a smart strap that makes it comfy for neck- hanging. Features are stripped to the minimum, however, and there's no sign of its predecessor's smart auto- equaliser function that matches the EQ settings to the track's musical genre. Actual audio performance is fi ne - the supplied inear headphones are average - and battery life is okay but unremarkable at ten hours (Rio's Nitrus hits 16).

The really bad news comes when trying to get tracks onto the jukebox. Not only has it been crippled by the use of a USB 1.1 connection - which takes nearly two hours to fill the hard disk - but the basic PC transfer software pales in comparison to Rio's. For a player where you'll want to be swapping in new songs frequently, this is fatal. All in all, this is a poor showing - what went wrong, Philips?
Adam Vaughan

KEY FEATURES:
Plays MP3 and WMA, PC-only, connects via USB 1.1, neck strap supplied, battery life: 10 hours, dimensions: 54.3 x 84.5 x 18.3mm, weight: 95g