Sony Walkman Bean NW-E305 (512MB, Coconut White)

Pros: Awesome battery life, battery charges very rapidly, good sound quality

Cons: Must use Sony's Sonic Stage software to import music

Summary: I just bought one of these for my mother. The OLED screen is amazingly clear and bright and easily read even with the mid-day Arizona sun glaring off of it (unlike my 15GB 3g iPod). I have not tested the included headphones, as they are almost always cheap and have crappy sound. Instead, I gave her my old Sony MDR-EX71SL/WK (white)s and contrary to the CNet review, there was no "hiss-filled playback". In fact, the sound was clearer than from my iPod (and the files were pulled straight from my iTunes library, meaning it had the same bitrate).

As for the controls, the hardest part was figuring out how to take the player off of "hold" (done simply by sliding the USB port cover a very tiny bit out of the fully closed position). Navigating the menus is fairly simple and acessing the secondary functions of the buttons is as simple as holding them down for a second or so longer than for the primary functions. the 5-position hat switch that controls playback and volume is very intuitive and easily acessed when holding the player in the palm of your hand (which feels very natural).

As reported, it charges insanely fast (got a full charge from the low level charge it shipped with in just under an hour).

The FM tuner picks up a very clear signal.

My only complaint about the player itself is the placement of the OLED screen. While holding the player in the most natural position, the screen faces the palm of your hand and is thereby unreadable. Not a very large problem if your only skipping a track or adjusting the volume.

The Sonic Stage software is decent, but by no means does it help the player. while the newest release (v3.3) was easy enough for me to use, my mother gave up after about 5 minutes of trying to load a song onto the player. A simple to use format converter/uploader program would have been a much better better choice for Sony to include. Or perhaps made it drag and drop. the fact that it can't handle any DRM other than Sony's ATRAC3 is not a very big hassle. It seems to upload the music to the player very quickly (100 MB in under 30 seconds, tons faster than my iPod which takes on average about 10 seconds a song).