The GoGear series from Phillips have been out for a while now, and consist of a wide range of flash and hard drive powered devices which include everything from budget audio recorders to expensive digital cameras. The general idea behind the brand is that everything is ultra portable, and it’s the range where Phillips is most obviously trying to compete with the Apple iPod.

So here’s the Opus, the newest attempt at trying to overthrow the iPod – the latest version is an 8GB system with video playback. You can grab it for under £100, which puts it in the mid-range of portable MP3 and video players right now. Design wise, the system lives up to the GoGear name – it’s slim and attractive, around the size of a typical mobile phone. It feels solid and well constructed and overall, it looks like a pretty attractive piece of kit.

The key thing you need to get used to when using the Opus is that despite looking quite a lot like an iPod touch, there’s no touch screen display. Everything is still controlled by buttons, which will come as a disappointment to some whilst making others very happy. Luckily, the controls are very responsive and backed up by an intelligent user interface that makes using the system very easy, if not as fun as a touch screen.

The screen itself is 2.8” and looks good, but not great. It’s perfect for menu navigation and MP3 usage, but we’ve seen better screens on devices that are touted as playing video. That isn’t to say the screen isn’t perfectly good, it’s just not as good as some of the systems competitors. Sound quality is great though – the bundled headphones are as average as expected but replace them with a decent set and you’ll find a player that easily surpasses the Touch in terms of sound quality.

One of the biggest draws of the system is the formats it can play. FLAC support is available, which is rare for big name MP3 players. There’s also support for WMA and AAC while the video mode will happily play back Mpeg4, AVI and WMV9 video, so it’s got a decent range of support for a variety of file formats – certainly more than any Apple system and more than most other MP3 players as well. Once again though, the default speakers aren’t good enough to notice the difference in quality between FLAC and MP3, making them even more redundant.

All the usual features of MP3 players are present and correct on the Opus – FM radio and voice recording all work fine. The battery is rechargeable – although the system annoyingly doesn’t come with a mains charger – and lasts for up to 30 hours for music. Given this large playback time, it’s even more annoying that the system only runs for a very weak 4 hours of video. With recent players in the same price range easily achieving double that on larger screens, it really lets down the system.

Overall, the Opus is an average system. There’s no real reason why we wouldn’t recommend, but there’s no reason why we would, either. You can get both improved video and battery in the same price range, and you need to add a good £20 to the standard price if you haven’t already got a decent set of headphones. If we got one of these for Christmas we wouldn’t be disappointed, we just wouldn’t go out and buy one on our own.