Philips EXP431 Pocket MP3-CD Player with Song Title Display

Rating:
Summary: I'm 100% satisfied with this product
Review: I bought this awesome Mini CD/Mp3 player two day ago... IT'S EXCELENT!!! Seriously, don't serch any more. It has hundreds of functions, it works prefectly well. I dicided to buy exactly this player because of several reasons:
1º-It is amazingly small, you can take it around in any pocket
2º-Lots of songs fit in 1 Pocket CD if recorded in Mp3 format (between 40-45 songs, 4 and a half minutes each)
3º-The music quality of Mp3 format is as good as WAV (wich makes it better than a mini Disc that uses ATRAC 3)
In fact I couldn't beleive the amazing sound quality that PHILIPS has put into this particular player; I'm a maniac when it comes to music quality and both the player and the headphones ROCK!
Mini CD/Mp3 players are not common at all but definately SHOULD!
Believe, me if you are looking for the same things I wrote above in a player, buy this one... you won't regreat it; seriously.

Rating:
Summary: I'm 100% satisfied with this product
Review: I bought this awesome Mini CD/Mp3 player two day ago... IT'S EXCELENT!!! Seriously, don't serch any more. It has hundreds of functions, it works prefectly well. I dicided to buy exactly this player because of several reasons:
1º-It is amazingly small, you can take it around in any pocket
2º-Lots of songs fit in 1 Pocket CD if recorded in Mp3 format (between 40-45 songs, 4 and a half minutes each)
3º-The music quality of Mp3 format is as good as WAV (wich makes it better than a mini Disc that uses ATRAC 3)
In fact I couldn't beleive the amazing sound quality that PHILIPS has put into this particular player; I'm a maniac when it comes to music quality and both the player and the headphones ROCK!
Mini CD/Mp3 players are not common at all but definately SHOULD!
Believe, me if you are looking for the same things I wrote above in a player, buy this one... you won't regreat it; seriously.

Rating:
Summary: Flawless
Review: I was pleasantly surprised by not only how small this thing is, but how feature packed it is. The attention to detail and design (eg. the optional clip on remote) is awesome, and at this price point, worth every penny. The sound is incredible with my new Sony MDR-EX71SL Fontopia Earbuds (great combo). The unit does come with its own earbuds (which are actually pretty good, a little bulky) but I opted to buy my own. This thing even drives my Sennheiser HD570's fairly well, which are beasts compared to size of the player, and require quite a bit of juice. Not that the Sennheisers would be practical with the Philips EXP431, but I had to try ;)

All in all, a great product. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Even smaller than I though!
Review: Impressive, small and nice sound, I had a MPD8081 from memorex, another 8cd mp3 player, after I lost that mp3 player, I decided to buy a philips pocket expanium (I'm a really good fan of 8cm cds mp3 players), the style of the EXP411 was great and when I saw the EXP431 here at amazon, I just couldn't wait to get one; When I received it and opened the box, my bigger impression was that it was actually smaller of what I was expecting!

The remote is cool, good headphones and the features are great, play modes (shuffle all/album) are nice options, also the bass/treble/esp features are good, I haven't had any problem with the cdr's and cdrw's I had burned, it does not includes rechargables batteries either a car power supply adapter, but battery life is good and to have 40-50 songs in a single minicd is great, I prefer to have some minicds with the music I like than a bunch of GBs of music that I don't really listen.

One of the first things I did was to upgrade the firmware, It was quite difficult to find the file on the net since philips website is a mess, sorry philips guys, but that's the true, you didn't even have the EXP431 in your online catalog; after all, the upgrade process was easy, I copied the file into a cdrw, then put it in the pocket expanium, wait a couple of minutes until the upgrade process completed. The 480 Sec Magic Electronic Skip Protection really works, since I bought it, it hasn't skipped even once!

Rating:
Summary: This is great!
Review: Stop shopping, this is the one to get. And this is the store to buy from, with Amazon's top service.

These are the things I like about this MP3 player:

Quality construction, small size, nice layout of controls. It has a slide switch on the back to disable all the buttons, so you won't disrupt playback when it is in your pocket. The skip and search controls act like the ones on a CD player. You can press the forward and reverse buttons to go to the next or previous song. If you hold them down, they scan through the song. There are album forward and reverse buttons to skip directly to the next or previous album on your disc. Albums are a group of MP3's in a directory or folder on the disc, which you determine when you burn the disc. It recognizes and displays title and artist tags in the MP3 files if they are there. It also recognizes Joliet-formatted discs so you can use long filenames for the songs. I recommend keeping the filenames to less than 50 characters long because some players have trouble with very long filenames. This player displays the first 39 characters of long filenames, and otherwise does not appear to have a problem with long filenames. There are 2 levels of bass boost and 1 level of treble boost. The battery compartment is inside the lid underneath where you put the CD. The compartment has a hinged lid, so it won't come off and get lost. A remote control comes with the player that can optionally be used between the main unit and the headphones. Other accessories included are a wrist strap, AC adapter, and one blank disc.

These are the things I like about the pocket CD format:

Pocket CDs are so much fun. This format gives you more freedom from your computer, compared to relying on your computer's hard disk space and repeatedly downloading onto just a few memory sticks. You can actually afford enough blank media to convert your whole CD, tape, and record collection to pocket CDs. Disks are typically 210 MB each and very inexpensive when you buy a spindle, and each will hold 3 to 4 hours of music. I like putting whole box sets of Cds on one or two pocket CDs. The CD's you burn for this will also play in most DVD players, so if you have your DVD player connected to your stereo, there you have another way to listen to your collection.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful, Speechless
Review: This player is amazing small, sleek and beautiful. I have the Philips 401, loved it for it small factor using 8cm cds, but found it a bit too bulky. When I got this, Philips 431, my jaws dropped, 3/4 as small and twice as beautiful. I personally think this is the best deal for money for mp3 players. Here are my reasons:

1. Size. It's true that you can fit 2-3x times more songs on a normal size cd, but the normal size cd player are much too big compared to this. I have the iriver-350 as well, thin and nice but still too big compared to this exp 431.

2. Storage. One could argue that memory-based/hard disk based mp3 players are much smaller than this. But what about the cost? I find the cost for memory/hard disk mp3 players way too expensive. If a cd get scratched, we simply write another cd. But if you hard disk gets screwed up, there goes your couple of hundred dollars. As for the memory-based players, it's too much effort and time to download different songs each time. And for that money that you are paying???

Oh, and did I forget to mention that this wonderful player reads id3 tags as well, so you know what song you are playing!! And with the 480sec skip protection, you can easily bring it with you anywhere :)