act210/psa128 = double-edged sword

Author's Rating:

Pros: It's small, rugged, and you can hardly tell it's there when exercising

Cons: Software issues on driver install, format necessary on occasion, USB 1.1 is slow

The Bottom Line: 
If you have patience for bugs in the software & a slow USB, and want a highly practical design for an mp3 player (thanks Nike), then buy this product.

Author's Review
Thankfully I'm computer savvy, otherwise I would not be listening to mp3's during my morning run.

I was forced (after mucking through philips download search engine) to install these drivers in a most user-unfriendly manner, that is to say, I had to perform an advanced installation & pick the drivers from their location within the tiered zip file nike/philips provided. Directions regarding this installation are not included with the unit, but downloaded from the philips site along side the drivers.

Once my computer recognized the unit as a drive, I quickly threw on several songs and tested it out. Much to my delight, the sound quality is great. I'm sure you could test it's limits with a super-high bitrate mp3 if one felt so inclined, but I would rate the player & the stock headphones highly.

The only bothersome thing I found with this conveniently small player (complete with armband), is the magnets. First off, having powerful magnets floating around a small piece of computer hardware, is a poor idea to begin with. In this unit's case, the magnets seem to get in the way more than they help with anything at all. If it weren't for them, it would be much lighter overall.

One more problem comes to mind. It's source I can only guess is the magnets that are permanently attached to the headphone wire. As I stepped out the door the other day, I hold down the play button for 2 seconds (which is the method of turning the device on & off) and much to my chagrin the device showed no signs of life.

The conveniently placed magnet was stuck to the top of the unit, and after prying it off & calling tech support the fellow there guided me through a process of formatting the device twice, which resets some unknown chunk of ROM somewhere inside of it. The process was simple enough, and useful knowledge for the future. Unfortunately it's hugely time consuming because of the slow USB connection present. Having to load 30 songs onto this player takes about as long as burning a CD at 8x.