Philips HDD060

With a footprint smaller than a credit card and only as thick as a matchbox, the Philips HDD060 is one of the smallest hard disk digital media players we have yet to see. It contains a tiny hard disk that can hold 1.5Gb of MP3 or WMA music, which works out at around 250 songs.

For the most part it's a great piece of kit. The large display and friendly menu system makes it easy to pick tracks by playlist, genre, artist or album. Philips has also equipped the player with its SuperScroll technology.

Just hold down the scroll key and track lists are skipped by alphabetical letter, not individual track. This makes it very easy to locate a specific track, especially if you have a lot of music on the player.

The sound quality is very impressive too, particularly for such a small device. There's a range of EQ settings, so you can always get the best sound for your particular choice of music genre. The on-board battery gives you around 10 hours of playback from a full charge.

At this point, it almost sounds like a perfect player. Unfortunately, there are a few things that let it down. First, the Philips Digital Media Manager (DMM) software has to be used to transfer music files to the player, even though the HDD060 is recognised as external storage by Windows. Any file just dragged and dropped onto the player will not work, due to digital rights management software in the player.

It doesn't help that DMM is a little clunky to use. It's quite slow, even with the player's USB 2 connection and it's not immediately obvious how to perform simple tasks, such as creating playlists.

Furthermore, there's no resume mode after the HDD060 has been turned off, making it quite frustrating to find the last track you were listening to. It would be nice if there was an option for a wired remote control to save fishing the player out of a pocket or bag every time you want to change tracks.

Aside from these minor niggles, though, the HDD060 is very capable player at a reasonable price.

Contact: Philips 0870 900 9070
www.philips.co.uk