One of the difficulty about talking about non-Apple Portable Media Players, or PMPs, is that they tend to drift towards comparisons of the competitor’s brand versus the iPod. I think we all agree that the iPod and iPhone dominate the mobile music/entertainment market, but there are other PMPs that do the job just as well, even better.

I’ve noticed that non-Apple Portable Media Players are going for better features. True, Apple does have models with touchscreens, and new classic models have 80 to 160GB worth of memory in them. Most PMPs made by other companies generally have 4 to 8GB, and perhaps that is all a consumer needs. After all, most consumers live day to day downloading new music and video files and then erasing old ones. So all a consumer needs is 4-8 GB, which is good for about 25 hours worth of playback. I’m talking about PMPs such as the Phillips SA6145 and the Insignia Pilot.

The Insignia Pilot is a PMP with a 2.4 inch screen and works like an iPod turned on its side. This gives a “widescreen” kind of look to it, and the scroller wheel with Christmas tree like lights which serve as a texture.

Also on the Insignia Pilot has a Menu button that starts off everything including the video viewer, music, FM tuner, and even some file viewer that is kind of “My Computer” file for the Pilot.

The Insignia Pilot has Bluetooth wireless compatibility, and there are some compatible headphones that are made for them. Speaking of compatibility, the audio files support MP3, WMA, WMA Lossless, WMA DRM, WMA Pro, OGG, WAV, Audible, MPEG, WMV, and JPEG formats.

The FM tuner worked very well, and it has 20 presets. You can even remember songs you hear by saving trac and artist data from FM stations broadcasting RDS data. You can even load up tunes or videos into the Secure Digital card expansion slot.

Setting up the Insignia Pilot to sync with the computer was pretty simple, and took only a few minutes. The software came with a digital music converter, as well as a link to the Best Buy digital music store. It connects up to the computer via mini-USB to USB, charges up quite quickly, and is upgradeable for future formats and features.

The Insignia Pilot is available on the Best Buy Site. The 4GB model is $129.99 and 8GB for $159.99.