Philips' ShoqBox Personal Sound System is a clock radio, MP3 player and a speaker system all in one little device. It could be your new favorite travel companion.

Summary

I rarely use the clock radio in a hotel room.  One, I don’t trust that it will work, and two, I don’t want to spend the time figuring out the typically Byzantine path to programming it.  Lately I’ve been using my cell phone for an alarm, but I prefer music to the beep of my Treo.  And I prefer my music to what plays on most commercial radio stations.  The confluence of these preferences leads me to Philips’ ShoqBox Personal Sound System:  A combination alarm clock, speaker system and MP3 player in a travel-size case. 

Design and Features

At 2.28 x 2.08 x 7.16 inches and a ¾ pound, ShoqBox is the size and weight of a 1990-era cell phone.  You wouldn’t tote it around like an iPod, but it’s small enough to fit easily in carry-on luggage.  Two tiny speakers deliver stereo sound either from FM radio or digital tunes stored in flash memory inside the device.  It also accepts an input from a portable music player, enabling you to listen to a vault of tunes stored on an iPod or Zen through the tiny music system.  At night it’s a music playback system; in the morning it’s an alarm clock.  Now that’s versatile. 

Our PSS110 review unit was a 256MB version ($129) on which I crammed 28 jazz tracks and then, after a swap out, 44 shorter-length pop songs.  A higher capacity version doubles storage to 512MB and lists for $149.

ShoqBox’s alarm clock wakes you to a buzzer, radio or your own MP3 or WMA tunes that you’ve downloaded to the device.  Its rechargeable battery specs at 10 hours, so you need to back up battery power with the supplied AC charger when you travel.  The sleep timer sets to intervals of 15, 30 and 60 minutes.

Various equalizer settings tailor sound to genres including rock, hip-hop, jazz, dance and funk.  The differences among the modes are subtle; you’re likely to stick just with one or turn them off altogether.  The Dynamic Bass Boost button, on the other hand, beefs up the overall output, pumping up the sound to levels that defy the size of the mini music maker. 

Image Courtesy of Philips

Performance

The sound from this half-pint hifi system is surprisingly robust.  The 4-watt system can fill a room with without lisping or sounding screechy at the high end.  There’s just so much bass you can get from a pair of speakers the diameter of a half dollar, but ShoqBox does a nice job there, too.  It’s an impressive little unit. 

Of course, the user has control over sound quality, depending on the amount of compression used.  You’re far more tempted to cut the audio corners if it means getting 100 tunes on a device rather than 25.  The 256MB flash fills way too quickly.  At $20 more, the 512MB version is the only way to go, and even that is on the “lite” side.

There was a glitch with some of the songs not playing on the device, even though they listed on the Musicmatch device manager and showed up on the ShoqBox display.  I don’t know whether to blame Musicmatch or ShoqBox for the bad handoff, but some songs from the same album played and some didn’t.

Just when I was going to sign off on performance with glowing marks, the PSS110 locked up.  It wouldn’t play, change tunes, or power off, instead remaining stuck at the 0:00 second mark of Madeleine Peyroux’s J’Ai Deux Amours.  The clock, strangely enough, continued to change on the display and show the correct time, albeit in the 24-hour format.  I’ll have to wait for the unit to lose juice and try again