When it comes to consumer electronics, Philips is one of the top brands in the market. Even though the market is saturated with MP3 players of all kinds, there’s an interesting notion behind Philips’ ShoqBox PSS110 Portable Music System. The idea is that you can store all your music files on the player itself, but instead of listening to it via a pair of earphones, you can entertain yourself with its built-in speakers.

From an external standpoint, the PSS110 looks pretty sleek with two clearly visible speaker units and standard buttons situated throughout the front area of the device. It contains a white backlight color with battery status, DBB and time information prominently displayed on the screen. According to Philips, you’ll get five lines of text on a screen with resolution of 128x96.

In the recent months, we’ve noticed that a lot of companies have been integrating audio enhancing features and preset equalizer options. The same applies to ShoqBox, as it comes with Classic, Hip Hop, Jazz, Pop and Rock equalizer settings in addition to a nice frequency response and dynamic bass boost as one of the advanced sound enhancing alternatives.

The ShoqBox can playback MP3 and WMA formats with ID3-tag support and has an FM tuner with 10 station presets. However, the onboard flash storage is limited to 256MB, which is not all that exciting if you have a lot of music files.

As far as the connectivity is concerned, you’ll get a single aux-in connector, a headphones jack, a power connector and USB 1.1 support. You’ll also get a rechargeable lithium-in battery that requires up to four hours of charging for a total of 10 hours of playback time.

Initial Thoughts: The Philips ShoqBox appears to be decent unit from its specifications. While the looks are impressive, the lack of additional format support isn’t too encouraging. Since majority of the online music retailers are moving to DRM protected format, it’s now a critical configuration to support, however, we are certain that Philips can fix the issue by releasing a firmware upgrade. The battery life on the player is nice considering that it’s an external MP3 player; Philips is lucky in that it got away with the battery life issue because if it was a standard MP3 player with flash memory and a battery life of 10 hours, this product would’ve never been successful in the market. This brings us to another point – limited onboard memory. Philips doesn’t give you a choice to pick between various storage sizes, which is disappointing. The current storage option just wouldn’t cut it for the majority of you. Furthermore, USB 2.0 is a standard for fast transfer speeds with MP3 players these days, but apparently the ShoqBox lacks such a connection. With a price of $129.99 at Philips Online Retail Store, it doesn’t appear to be as exciting as the original concept. (Image Courtesy: Philips)