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"Awesome once you're all set up"
3.5 starson by lanabaPros: Sleek design, good sound, easy to navigate, good battery life
Cons: Awful software, no special features, flimsy pouch
Summary: The player itself is very sleek and small, due to its lack of extra features. It plays music and that's all it does. The case is a sturdy, solid (but lightweight) brushed metal. It shouldn't scratch or break very easily. There is an option that allows you to hold it vertically or horizontally (the display rotates either way). The sound is excellent for such a tiny device, and the battery life is awesome. The only major downfall of the player is its SonicStage software. It is required in order to transfer music to your player and is just a mess. It took me about an hour to transfer 5GB of my music and it was a huge pain. The program shut down about 12 times in the process. But once I got all my music transferred, the player was great. Another thing that annoys me is the lack of a case with a belt clip. I rarely have pockets on me big enough to hold an mp3 player, so I don't really have a place to put it when I'm walking around, which is a little inconvenient. The case I saw from Sony that you have to buy separately is pretty ugly. Aside from these annoyances, the player is pretty cool.
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While I find the software does lock up WindowsXP with extended length of use (and eats up the "C" drive), the transfer time you experienced seem high unless you are converting every MP3 into the default Atrac3 for the first time. A suggestion; do a straight MP3 transfer with no conversion (check settings box on the transfer page) and then slowly convert over if you need the MP3's compressed by Atrac3 for space, it will fill the player's full usable 18.7gb in half that time. Note: always remove the file from the player first if you want it to be replaced by the smaller sized one. One other suggestion: I got annoyed at the use of Sony for categorizing the MP3's by genre and album, so I used a great program call "Tag&rename" which allows you to perform a bulk blanking out of these categories which puts all the files strictly under the artist and a lot easier to browse!!
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