Hey.
I'm Donald Bell.
This is a First Look for the Philips GoGear Connect 3. This is an Android 2.3 based portable media player priced at a $179.
There's not a lot to it for better or for worst.
Mostly, I kinda feel for worst.
You'll be getting a 3.2-inch screen so it's kind of a cramped screen.
Now, you're not getting a camera, no GPS.
You see a lot of competing products in the space trying to compete against the Apple iPod touch.
Samsung has a few out, the Galaxy players.
Sony has one out but this is really the first one to try and beat the iPod touch on price at $179 but for the cheaper price, you also are getting a cheaper experience.
My main glide period is that the screen quality is really pretty bad.
It's a really horrible viewing angle here that practically brings out and it turns black.
So if you are trying to think about this a video player, you're not gonna have a great video experience.
Screen brightness is also pretty dim.
Screen resolution is not that great.
Also we have something like the Kindle Fire out there for a $199, just $20 more.
If you are looking for a great Android experience with a great high-quality screen, that's a much better product to go for.
I did like the default music player for this.
This is using the Songbird application.
It does a pretty interesting job bringing in Flicker photo galleries for whatever artist you are playing.
There are some interesting sound-enhancing features here from Philips.
There's also a Facebook integration so that you could post whatever your currently playing song is to your Facebook page.
There's a Last FM scrabbling of you kind of playing track.
So a lot of well-thought out features here for the music player.
Some other pretty good music-based apps that are built into this for mode and rhapsody but you can really get those apps on any kind of Android device you want.
So that's not really what's gonna sell this thing over other devices.
You should just know that the money you are saving on this device really does make itself known when you pick it up and you see the screen quality.
Another gripe here is that there is no memory expansion.
So you are stuck with either the 8 gigabyte of 16 gigabyte capacity.
So that folks is Go Gear Connect 3. For CNET.com, I'm Donald Bell
