I have been looking for a small, portable, cost efficient MP3 player for awhile...something to take to the gym or on a run, etc. When I found the Philips Rush SA235 at Costco for $80, I grabbed it, having had superb Philips audio products in the past (stereos, walkmans, etc). Don’t be fooled. I found this to be a substandard product.
I haven’t found that the player crashes if you dowload unsupported audio files (anything OTHER than MPEG)...if you load an AAC audio file on the thing, you will just never hear it. Nevertheless, to avoid the crashing possibility, I don’t suggest loading those on the player.
Even with a hard drive full of MPEGs, the player would completely freeze in the middle of a song, or shut itself off. When the player freezes, I can’t even manually turn the thing off...I have to disassemble the thing and REMOVE THE BATTERIES. This happened every 2 minutes or so, after only having the thing 2 weeks.
I called Philips, who told me to download an update that should fix the problem. I couldn’t get the download to load on the player, either on my own OR guided by the phone technician (who is employed offshore in the Caribbean, but that’s a whole different story). Some fault in the actual player does not allow the install program to recognize that it’s waiting for the update.
My only course of action now is to return the player to Philips along with all the components (wrist strap, necklace...don’t lose ANY of it if you ever have to return the thing) so they can either fix it or send another one in its place. This after not even a MONTH of owning the stupid thing.
The ONLY pros about the player are the small size, and the fact that it has an expandable memory slot for another 256 MB SD card. Those would be GREAT....if you could get the thing to WORK consistently. I cannot, in good faith, recommend this product to anyone. Two thumbs down.