Philips AT9240 Personal CD Player

This portable CD player is excellent. Its case is thick and is rather rugged. When you open it and handle the lid, it feels reinforced. It is rather thick and the connections to the body of the player are solid. Another tribute to the ruggedness of the player is that the battery compartment is hidden inside the lid (you take out the CD, change batteries, and reinsert the CD), which leaves less components to abuse in the hostile world outside the solid lid.

I've used it with both Alkaline and NiMH batteries and it is quite conservative with its power usage. A fully charged set of NiMH was depleted only about halfway at the end of a four-hour trip, playing CDs at 90% maximum volume.

It plays CD-R and CD-RW media (granted, as it prominently advertises on the packaging), and offers a digital radio that supports nine (I think) presets for both AM and FM stations. Another very minute point is that tuning is in 100 kHz increments rather than 200 kHz, as some radios are -- this offers you double the granularity if a station is being problematic.

Another two very useful features that it offers is a switch to enable a "resume" mode and a "hold" mode. I immediately figured out what "hold" does -- locks all controls and displays something to the effect of "lock on" on the digital display when any button is pressed. However, it took me a long time to figure out what "resume" does -- instead of starting in the beginning of track one, it resumes a CD track wherever it left off if the CD player turns off. The only problem I have with it is that if "resume" is on and I press stop to stop the track, and stop again to turn off the player, then press Play again, it doesn't resume exactly where it stopped. I think on several occasions it even resumed on a different track.

The last thing on this side of the coin is the fact that it has a 45-second skip protection and that there's a digital bass boost with two settings. The boost has almost no effect.

There are three downsides, and all are ranging from purely theoretical to minor.

First, the lid opens too easily -- it's easy to trigger it just by handling the player roughly. I think I managed to accidentally open it just once.

Second, the resume/hold switch appears flimsy just because it jiggles on the player if you jiggle it. Also, the way it's constructed, I can imagine that a thread of shaggy clothing may get caught on a corner of the switch and may just pop the switch off. (Yes, the things that go through my paranoid mind when I am laying in bed, trying to fall asleep.) However, to be fair, the switch has been very reliable up to this point. It works without fail and has not fallen off in the three years that I've had the player.

Third, the buttons and the logo on top of the CD player are coated with silver paint. Wear causes this paint to come off, displaying intermittent black spots on the logo and scratches on the buttons. Functionality is obviously unchanged and even with this minor cosmetic defect, the player still looks very elegant.

Once again, the player is very well constructed. After three years of semi-regular use, with various batteries, various features, and various types of CDs, it still works one hundred percent. In my experience, this is one of the best purchases of my relatively short life.