Gone are the days when a boombox was the biggest meanest, ugliest piece of eighties tech you could find. Adorned with enough red flashing LED's to eat the batteries in 30 minutes and so heavy it required a shelf to be fitted to the users shoulder resulting in the characteristic swagger along Walthamstow market. For this is a mini boombox about the length of a banana, although white rather than yellow and it would look quite daft perched on the shoulder.

Apparently Philips see this flash based MP3 player as a way to let the youth (spelt yoof) of today express themselves and share music with their homeboys (buddies) and in essence this is similar to many of the Ipod docking stations we've tested in recent months. MP3 is seen as a solitary pastime with the MP3 player as a direct replacement for that old Sony walkman, but the PSS110 while packing 256mb of storage is also a mini boombox with 2 speakers with XSL acoustics that claim to fill a room with sound.

This is no small achievement for a device that sits comfortably in the palm but maybe the 350 gram weight (equal to 3 average mobile phones) might put you off leaving it tucked into your pockets for too long. Driven from an easily readable screen in the middle of the unit the PSS110 is all that you'd expect of a flash MP3 player, tracks can be browsed by artists / title and playlists can be accessed, the control buttons are grouped around the screen in a logical if not perfect layout.

The Philips PSS110 supports both MP3 and WMA files and it can also act as a set of speakers for other audio devices that connect through the audio input socket, plus when you run out of tunes from the 256mb memory you can switch to the inbuilt FM tuner. The only shame is that Philips decided not to include a removable memory slot this leaves the USB 2.0 connection as the only way to load up your PSS110.

Battery life is a claimed 10 hours but initial tests show this to be optimistic if you are running the Philips at anywhere near full volume, audio output is claimed to be enough to fill a room which would be quite a feat considering that the larger JBL systems struggle to achieve that. When our man James went to CES he got a good look at the PSS110 but sadly no chance to verify it's audio output level, we'll have to hope he has more success at Cebit in a few weeks time.

Of course we thought that the Logic3 iStation would sound weedy and were subsequently amazed at its audio output and the Philips mini boombox uses the same style of titanium speaker technology to get more bass and level from smaller units.

Finally a feature we guess will be lost on the youth of today, an alarm clock, what self respecting teenager is going to use an alarm clock to get up on time, oh well maybe there is hope for the rest of us yet.

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