Philips USA AJL308 Clock Radio with 7-Inch TFT LCD Color Display and USB/SD Card Slot

There is a lot to love about this product. It's sleek. It's stylish. It's bright, bold and clear. (It can be dimmed!) It's a clock-radio with two independent alarms that also plays audio files (.mp3 and .wma), video (mpeg4 and divx codices) and photo slide shows (.jpg only). It has built-in "relaxation" sounds to help you fall asleep. It has so much going for it! And just when you think it can't get any better...

It doesn't get better. It slips a little. You start thinking to yourself, "If only..." and "Why didn't they just take the next step?" Why isn't there a tiny bit of built-in memory so that I don't need a SD card or USB stick to be attached to change the cute-but-becoming-annoying default photo? Why can't I select an audio file on the SD or USB as my alarm music? Why only three built-in sounds for the "relaxation" music? Why isn't there an AM tuner? Why isn't there a headphone jack? Why can I only display JPEG-format images? For a widescreen 7" LCD picture frame,...Read more

You'll be impressed when you take this unit out of the box...a very handsome design, until you turn it on. There are two fatal flaws, and several annoyances. First, even in "dim" setting, the considerable real estate on the 7" LCD gives off so much light that you can read a newspaper in the room (I tried it!). I would need eyeshades to sleep in the same room. (You get the choice of red, green, blue, and purple "wallpaper", but NOT black, which would have solved this problem, at least at night). Second, and I can't believe this: a full half of the screen in "clock" mode is taken up by the picture frame. However, you have three choices for that half of the screen (which you will be seeing all night long): 1. You can forever look at the picture of two people that Philips has selected to be your permanent roommates, or 2. You can load your own photo, BUT that will require you to have a USB memory stick permanently protruding from the left side of the unit, or 3. Buy a separate SD...Read more

A previous reviewer pretty much pegged it: stylish hardware, nice screen, nothing else I've seen quite like it at this price point. But oh, where did they go to get the software??? Imagine: file names with only the first six characters displayed; no effective way to navigate among (thousands of) music or picture files; white borders on the sides of standard 4:3 ratio pictures contrasting glaringly with the glossy black frame; or, use the 16:9 screen format and just not show people's heads; no slide show in Clock mode and no way to permanently replace the default picture that someone at Philips at least seems to like; and then there's the randomizer that doesn't really seem to. The operation of the unit isn't exactly intuitive either, and the documentation doesn't cover all features. They could easily fix most of the shortcomings in a software update, but remarkably enough the Philips website doesn't have a way for you to submit suggestions or complaints (that's a 'future'). A great...Read more