Yanesh Tyagi writes …

June 22, 2008

Phillips Go Gear SA-31 Media Player – Repairing Firmware

Filed under: Gadgets, Music Players — yaneshtyagi @ 1:43 pm
Tags: , , ,

I purchased Phillips Go Gear SX 31 Device on 14th Feb 2008 from the Next’s store. This is a beautiful black device with easy interface. This was working fine up to Tuesday last week when it started to misbehave. Any song I tried to play was being played in the fast forward mode. It was producing strange sound in the earphones.
Thinking that any key might not have released, I pressed all the keys. But that doesn’t work. I switched the device off and then switched it on again. Hopefully, I tried to play the song. But again it was running like a jet plain – skipping 4 seconds at a time. The seconds count was 1…5…9…13..so on. Being a software professional (Microsoft technology), I thought of giving the device a hard boot. But the device has in-built battery and there is no way to remove its battery.

Today while I was enjoying my Sunday morning (at 11:30 am!), suddenly I remembered that the software that came with the device has an option to repair its firmware. I switched on my PC and tried the option of repairing the device. The device was repaired successfully. Thinking positively, I removed the device from USB connection and tried to play the song. But there was no song. The music folder was empty. With blowing heart, I checked my videos and pictures. All was gone. Even I lost my recorded sounds. The device came loaded with a video, that I like most. And not all was gone.

One thing that irritated me most, in the whole scenario, was that the repair software did not prompt me that my data may be lost. Although, I have the backups of my music, videos and pictures, I can’t get back my sound recordings. The lose is non-recoverable.

Steps to Repair:

  1. Open the Phillips SA-31xx device manager.
  2. Connect the player to the computer while pressing and holding the on/off button of the device (the inner round button.Phillips Go Gear SA-31xx Media Player repairing mode screen). Windows will tell you that a USB device is connected in the repair mode.
  3. The device’s screen will look like:

image

  1. On the device manager, click on the Repair tab.
  2. On Repair tab, click the Repair button. It will show the message that the device is repaired. The device will also show that it’s being repaired.

Phillips Go Gear SA-31xx Media Player Repair

3. After the device has been repaired, below message will be shown.

Phillips Go Gear SA-31xx Media Player Successfully Repaired

4. BEWARE ALL DATA WILL BE LOST from the Phillips Go Gear SA-31xx Media Player without any warning.

Related Posts:

visit http://yaneshtyagi.com for more details.

(c) Yanesh Tyagi.

March 11, 2008

Philips GoGear SA3115/97 Portable Media Player

Filed under: Gadgets, Music Players — yaneshtyagi @ 7:27 pm
Tags: , ,

I planned to gift a portable media player to my wife on this valentine day. After little market search and product analysis, I decided to buy PhillipsGoGear SA3115/97. It has a great look. It has appealing black color with 1.8″ color screen.

sa3115_97_rtf_

It has simple interface with keylock feature. keylock feature is very useful when you intend to keep your player into pocket. It locks all the keys except volume keys.

This Philips player has five keys on the front – 4 cursor keys and 1 multifunction key. These keys are placed in a circular keypad with soft touch. The multifuction key at the center of keypad is a dual key for playpause and onoff functionality. Press it once for playpause and press and hold for few seconds for onoff functionality.

There is one key on the lefyhand side with an icon on lock. This is the keylock key. One pair of keys are at right side. These are volume keys – for V+ and V-.

Below is a chart of common features of this media player:

Memory
Type : Flash
Capacity: 1GB
Expended Memory: not supported

Display
Coloured display with 1.8 inches screen.
Resolution: 160 x 128

Audio
Supports MP3 and WMA format.
Equalizer: 7 mode (Off Rock Funk Jaaz classic hip-hopp Dance.
Sound Quality: Above average however there is no question of comparing it with Apple iPod. iPod is much better than this. (well, one of the factor in my decision of buying this was money also.)

Video
Supports only WMA format. Additional support for 3gp format would be great.

Radio
Has FM receiver in built. You can set and save 10 channels.

Pictures:
Supports JPEG and BMP format. It comes with an media convertor utility which resizes and convert JPEG images to BMP images. Although the player can display JPEG images, very large images gets distorted. I copied my Siny Digital Camera (12 megapixels) images to the player without convertor utility. It took too longer to display and the displayed image was havily distorted. Then I used convertor utility which reduce the size of images to nearly 57 KB but the display was better.

Battery and Charging
Phillips GoGear has inbuilt lithium ion battery. This can only be charged through USB port of myour laptop or desktop. Or you can use an stand-alone USB charger, if you don’t have PC.

Lacking Features:

  1. Support for 3gp video format.
  2. Browse music by location. Currently you can browse music artist album Genere only. You can choose all songs as well but in that case songs are played in alphabatical order.
  3. Support for multiple playlist.
  4. Functionality to play all songs of an artist. Currently you have to choose artist and then its album. Once it has played all songs of that album and artist combination, you can set to repeat or repeat and shuffle within that album. It would be better if the player software automatically jump to next album of the same singer or to next singer.
  5. You can not listen music or viw video or photo while it is connected to computer. This is irritating as it needs to kep connecting for hours for charging.
  6. USB changer should be bundeld with the packet.

Great Features:
You can upgrade the firmware. It comes with a device manager that you install on your computer. Device manager check for the update avaible on Philips website and automatically updates the firmaware.

However, I could not use these feature. My players firmware version is 2.56 and the latest version available on the website is 3.7. When I used device manager to upgrade, it told me that my player has most updated version. I tried several times, but it keeps on giving the same message. finally I got frustrated and gave up.

Any suggestion, how can I upgrade the firmware to latest version?

Related Links:
Phillips Go Gear SA-31 Media Player – Repairing Firmware

visit http://yaneshtyagi.com for more details.

(c) Yanesh Tyagi.

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