Philips ShoqBox PSS110

July 25th, 2005 | by Rebecca Day

Performance

The sound from this half-pint hifi system is surprisingly robust.  The 4-watt system can fill a room with without lisping or sounding screechy at the high end.  There's just so much bass you can get from a pair of speakers the diameter of a half dollar, but ShoqBox does a nice job there, too.  It's an impressive little unit. 

Of course, the user has control over sound quality, depending on the amount of compression used.  You're far more tempted to cut the audio corners if it means getting 100 tunes on a device rather than 25.  The 256MB flash fills way too quickly.  At $20 more, the 512MB version is the only way to go, and even that is on the "lite" side.

There was a glitch with some of the songs not playing on the device, even though they listed on the Musicmatch device manager and showed up on the ShoqBox display.  I don't know whether to blame Musicmatch or ShoqBox for the bad handoff, but some songs from the same album played and some didn't.

Just when I was going to sign off on performance with glowing marks, the PSS110 locked up.  It wouldn't play, change tunes, or power off, instead remaining stuck at the 0:00 second mark of Madeleine Peyroux's J'Ai Deux Amours.  The clock, strangely enough, continued to change on the display and show the correct time, albeit in the 24-hour format.  I'll have to wait for the unit to lose juice and try again—and hope the crash was a one-time wonder.  Keep your fingers crossed.  

Conclusion

Philips has come up with a clever little device that makes a great travel companion.  Because of the limited storage, it doesn't replace an MP3 player but accessorizes one with amplified speakers and a tuner.  As a clock radio, it runs circles around the standard hotel alarm.  A few tweaks to the music wakeup options, radio preset process, and clock settings would make an already appealing product even better.  More memory just might make it irresistible.

Pros:

-          Better than most travel clock radio units

-          Plays MP3's

-          Supports batteries

-          Has an inline audio jack

-          Good sound quality

Cons:

-          Limited storage space

-          Quirky clock radio settings

-          Some problems with MusicMatch