Philips Rush MP3 Player

This
MP3 player from Philips looks sporty with its square shape, carrying pouch, and
belt clip. It comes with earphones and four preset equalizer settings–Normal,
Jazz, Rock, and Classic.

The Rush stores 32 MB of MP3 files on its Smartmedia card. It
comes bundled with RealJukebox, which is used to upload or delete files on the
player. Its large LCD displays information like name, artist, album, track
number, elapsed time, total time remaining, battery status, etc.

The player has a proprietary socket and connects to the
parallel port on your PC. However, it takes time transfer files. The audio CD
files when recorded using the RealJukebox on your PC, are stored as RMX files by
default. When transferring these files on to the player, they are converted to
MP3s on the fly, but it takes approximately an hour to transfer 32 MB of data,
that is, approximately one hour of music. Even in transferring MP3s it takes
approximately 4 minutes, 45 seconds to transfer 15 MB of files. However, it took
just 5 seconds to clear the contents on the card using the controls on the
player.

The player doesn’t have a recording feature, which is
standard in most MP3 players these days. It supports uploading files on to it,
but no download. It also has a useful bookmark feature for the user to jump to
his favorite track.

It runs on two AAA batteries and can also work with an AC/DC
adapter. Priced at Rs 17,990, it’s slightly steep for the features it
supports, but okay for someone looking for good sound quality.

Sandeep Saxena in Mumbai