My trusty old iPod died. It went through the wash. RIP.

I bought a Philips GoGear Vibe to replace it.

It’s about the size of a box of matches.

It’s half the cost of the equivalent iPod, but does the job almost as well. It’s easy to use, the UI is clear and simple. It comes with its own media player software for transferring files, but it’s some fly-by-night operation I’ve never heard of. (Rhapsody Media Player.) I’ve been using WinAmp to copy music to it, which works out-of-the-box.

It has some quirks. If you’ve got a long list of items (artists, albums, songs) to search through, scrolling through them is somewhat slow; there’s not a way to quickly jump through the list like there is with the iPod.

Any metadata (the information that contains things like artist, album and title for a particular file) that contains certain characters, such as slashes or colons, get quietly changed when getting copied to the player, which confuses WinAmp when I try to sync it again later. As a result, I’ve had to go through and massage all my metadata so it doesn’t contain any characters that the player doesn’t like. The media player that came with it might handle it more intelligently.

I’ve had it crash once already; I had to do a restore on it to get it working again, which erased everything on it, and I had to sync all my music again.

Overall rating (on the binary scale, natch): 1