Philips GoGear MP4 player SA2ARA04K/02 Ariaz 4GB - Dark Grey

In theory, this mp3 player comes with the necessary software which auto-installs when you connect it to your PC. But this didn't work for me. I got there in the end, by downloading the software from the company website instead, but it took me a while to figure out. Still, got there in the end and now I'm very happy with the player - headphones work really well.

The product works fine but when asking Philips for some help regarding a case that was suitable for the gym or running they were not interested.

Simply couldn't afford the equivalent Apple product, besides which the equivalent Apple product doesn't get great reviews by its users! Very pleased with this MP3 player - it does everything I wanted. Songbird went a bit crazy for a while as I loaded music onto the player but in its defence the software seemed to sort itself out with a big "switch off and back on".

I purchased one of these late last year, and found that when i added my mp3's to it, songs would often end abruptly and skip to the next track for no reason. I thought it was caused by how i was synching them to the player via the software provided, but drag and drop via windows explorer was just as bad. In the end, i had to give up on it, especially when on one occasion, something messed up during the track adding process and i found that each song had been added ten times meaning the display said i had thousands of identical tracks.

I had the following problem with 2 different Ariaz players - both were returned. I only wanted the players to play music. Some tracks (about 1 in 4 or 5) would skip short sections and occasionally part way through a track would end abruptly and go to the next track. I tried deleting all the tracks and reloading with both the Philips Songbird software supplied and also with Windows Explorer, but nothing worked satisfactorily. Eventually I bought a Sony Walkman NWZ-E which is performing perfectly and was £15 cheaper.