Philips Expanium EXP503 Personal CD Player

I bought this at Tweeter, which has a trade-up policy that I will shortly take advantage of. (Update- I exchanged it for another unit, which reads normal cds but not mp3 encoded cds. I'm giving up). I bought this thing on accommodation for a *mere* $150, and have owned it for roughly a month. It has wayyy too many things wrong with it for me to justify the price. One, it has no line-out, which is unforgivable, and the headphone jack is on the front which makes it impossible to mount in a car and make it look good. It also gets really hot underneath when the dc power supply is used. The LCD is backlit blue and looks good, but is really hard to read off-axis. The backlight turns on for about 4 seconds when you push buttons, and then turns off. I think they should have a backlight switch so you dont waste battery this way. The backlight quit working a week ago, so its a moot point anyway. The buttons also beep when you push them, something I find annoying, and the unit beeps when you pause it, something I also find aggravating. The point of pausing it is to NOT hear anything. The unit's headphone jack is also incapable of driving higher-impedance headphones like my Sennheiser 535s, so you are forced to use more efficient ones (like the crappy supplied earbuds). One of the most aggravating things wrong with it is this glitch in the ID3 reader that takes the last part of whatever the artist's name was before the artist name that you are viewing, and tacks it onto the one you are viewing; if the first artist you viewed was Matchbox 20, and the current one is REM, the ID3 readout will say REMchbox 20. The unit also has a display switch, but it doesn't remember your choice, thus, it displays this unneccessarily long filename whenever you switch tracks. The ergonomics are poor, and are hard to use if you use the belt clip. The ESP also turns on whenever you turn the player on, which wastes batteries if you forget to turn it off. The volume control is also recessed, which makes it hard to adjust, and the thing blows through batteries like nobody's business. You can expect maybe 6 hours on standard alkalines.

So what's good about this player? Not much. The backlight looks cool (when it works), and the player has good skip protection even when the ESP is off. It does read ID3 tags, and the belt clip is cool. Since I am currently on my second player, which also does not function properly, there is no way I can recommend this unit. I actually liked the player when it worked, but it has too many unforgivable flaws to be sold as a production unit.