- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 14 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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5 out of 5 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"Better than an iPod"
Pros: Great bass response, drag 'n' drop music loading, nice looking interface
Cons: Finiky with accepted audio formats, lanyard is impossible to get in
Summary: I can't believe that nobody has mentioned this MP3 player's biggest selling point: You load music onto it through drag 'n' drop! That's right - you can load music onto the player whether you are running Windows, Mac OS X, Mac OS 8.5, Linux, FreeBSD, Syllable, etc... absolutely no software required, your operating system just needs to support the basic USB mass storage driver.
When you load music onto the player and unplug it, it automatically rebuilds its own music database. This is a clever innovation that makes a lot of sense.
The audio quality is excellent, and Sony's ClearBass feature gives amazing bass response without distortion. There is a full graphic equaliser too.
The user interface is quite nice looking, which is a bonus. It's not rocket science to navigate either. One amazing part of the player (amazing to me, since I'm used to an HDD player) is that when you switch on the player, it immediately goes back to the exact part of the song you were listening to. When I say "immediately", I mean that it's playing again within a fraction of a second. Battery life is reportedly 33 hours for music, and so far my player is on track to achieve this.
The build quality is good, except for the lanyard. For some reason, I got a bonus lanyard with my player (included in the shipping carton), but it's impossible to feed it through the little hole. That's a bit disappointing. You do get a little plastic cradle which you're meant to put onto the optional charger accessory, but I found that the cradle was stable enough to keep the player standing upright on its own.
My other quibble is quite a major one actually. I have been trying for days to get video onto this MP3 player. You need such ridiculously precise specifications for the video, that your encoder is unlikely to meet all these specifications. As yet, all my attempts at encoding video for this thing have met with failure. I haven't given up yet, but would you really expect an ordinary person to go through all this struggle? Let's hope the upcoming Walkman software from Sony will help the situation.
All in all I've been happy with this MP3 player. Sound quality is good, build quality is solid, features are good, and its ease-of-use for transferring music makes iTunes look like Gentoo. If Sony can release a firmware update that loosens up the video format requirements, or include a Wine-compatible video encoding tool, they're onto a winner.
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