Occasionally dipping its toes into the portable audio market without really making much of a splash, Philips seems to be lining up a few new additions to its GoGear range, starting with the SA52 PMP (portable media player). Quite how much impact this will have is yet to be seen, since it appears to be waving its sights squarely in the direction of one of the most successful products of the last few years.

It'll take something pretty special to knock one of the Archos family from its perch, and while Philips players have always been pretty solid and well-performing, they're often a little on the uninspiring side.

One headline feature here, though, is the alleged audio ‘upscaling', which threatens to do the same for audio as compatible home cinema equipment has done for the standard definition DVD. Specifically, you can expect MP3s, WMA and AAC files to be pseudo-scaled to higher bitrates so, for example, a 128kbps encoded file should sound something like a 320kbps version.

We'd certainly be interested to see how effective this is, though with little pricing or availability information as yet we could be in for a bit of a wait. Elsewhere it appears as though Philips is targeting the entry-level side of the market, since there's only a 2.8-inch display, 4GB of internal capacity, support for WMV-only video and an FM radio.