Small speaker systems rarely win Crave over -- usually, they're tinny little things that make you want to clamp your hands over your ears and wail. But as with Intempo's iPod speakers earlier this week, the Philips PSS110 came as a pleasant surprise. It might not have the bass register of the surround systems we test here, but for an integrated FM radio and MP3 player it's impressive.
The spec sheet claims 8 hours of MP3 storage capacity on the PSS110's internal 256MB card. A simple calculation reveals this to be measured on the assumption that you're encoding your tracks at 64K. This might be good enough for drug addicts and the unemployed, but any self-respecting citizen won't find anything below 128K bearable for even casual music listening.
We had problems getting audio files to transfer to the PSS110. Unfortunately, it uses the notoriously poor Musicmatch Jukebox software. It would have been better if Philips had taken the same approach as iRiver and just let users drag and drop MP3s as if the PSS110 was a normal external hard disk. In our experience, Musicmatch just complicates what should be an extremely simple procedure. Despite these setbacks, the sound quality from the PSS110's small speakers is so good for such a small device we couldn't help but feel parental endearment towards the little blighter. - CS
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