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If you want a stylish mp3 player, but don’t fancy going down the well-travelled Ipod route, you’ll find it hard to resist the new Philips HDD6320 from – one of the sleekest players we’ve ever seen.
Naturally, there are no buttons on the front of the device – everything’s touch sensitive.
What we liked most about this 30GB player is the way controls only light up when they’re active.
It was this feature that enabled us to feel at home with the player within seconds of picking it up.
The way in which the vertical scrollwheel’s pulsating blue light follows your finger adds an extra touch of class.
The 2in 65K colour screen is of good quality and will display album art and jpegs. Unlike the new Apple Ipod, video isn’t catered for.
The HDD6320 will play mp3, wma (including digital rights wma files) and wav audio files. Formats such as Ogg Vorbis and aac are not supported – the latter will certainly disappoint Itunes fans.
Sound quality is terrific. While most mp3 players come with bog-standard earphones, Philips supplies a quality set of passive noise isolation earphones as standard, which is good to see.
The device will appear as a mass storage device within Windows when you hook it up via the USB cable, so you can also treat the HDD6320 as a portable hard drive.
Synching music is made easy thanks to its compatibility with Windows Media Player 10.
FM radios give digital audio players extra appeal, so we were rather surprised to see that Philips has opted not to include a tuner.
The quoted battery life of 17 hours is about average for a hard disk audio player.
The HDD6320 is a quality player that simply oozes style. The omission of an FM tuner and limited format support is annoying, but we still think it’s more than a match for Apple’s Ipod.
See also:
Digital music players come in various guises, and it's not always easy to know the differences. We explain the main types of player. 15 Feb 2006
All MP3 Players
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