Sony Network Walkman NW-E407 1 GB

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The Sony E407 has the same memory as the market leader from a fruit named company at 1GB, but when I bought it in April 2006 it was £30 dearer than it's rival's white coloured equivalent memory sized player at £129.99. I bought this for the size, style and quality that I associate with the Sony brand and in this I was not disappointed.

The E407 is very small at around 85mm high, 30mm wide and 14mm thick (3/3/8" ...
...a beautiful thing with what Sony call an 'Organic EL screen' delivering three lines of text so you can view, track title, artist and time of track. The whole of the E407 looks very funky and fresh with the blue EL display, minimalist buttons and cigarette lighter style knob. I believe that the E407 comes with various other screen colours, but I could only find the blue unit. I like the whole look and feel of the E407, its nice

The ... more

Sony's Network Walkman E407 is this companies latest addition to the flash media MP3 player market. It boasts some decent statistics with a small size, light weight and long battery life, but does it work and is it any good? In answering this lets look at the E407 in detail and see how it all stacks up.

The Sony E407 has the same memory as the market leader from a fruit named company at 1GB, but when I bought it in April 2006 it was £30 dearer than it's rival's white coloured equivalent memory sized player at £129.99. I bought this for the size, style and quality that I associate with the Sony brand and in this I was not disappointed.

The E407 is very small at around 85mm high, 30mm wide and 14mm thick (3/3/8" x 1/1/8" x 5/16" in old money). Its weight is something to boast about as well because it didn't even register 50 grams (1 1/2oz) on my kitchen scales, it's that light. It comes with a belt clip, headphones, headphone extension, USB cable and a CD disc. The box also had five language booklets ranging from English through to, French, German, Spanish and Dutch, so I guess everyone is pretty much covered here then.

Putting the belt clip onto the E407 is easy and it stays on even when I use it at the gym. Due it is weight it would be easy to forget it was there if I wasn't wearing headphones. The controls for song selection are relatively easy to use with a few tiny buttons and a twisty knob top and pull out action for song selection. There are two little tabs on the top for volume control. The display is a beautiful thing with what Sony call an 'Organic EL screen' delivering three lines of text so you can view, track title, artist and time of track. The whole of the E407 looks very funky and fresh with the blue EL display, minimalist buttons and cigarette lighter style knob. I believe that the E407 comes with various other screen colours, but I could only find the blue unit. I like the whole look and feel of the E407, its nice

The E407 normally sits on my belt or is hooked into my gym shorts. Here the knob control is difficult to use and some of the buttons are on the clip side of the unit. This is purely because you cannot see the EL screen and the repeat and sound style buttons are small at best. When you take the unit off the belt and have it in your hands it is easier to use or select songs. Here you can pull out the knob one click to select tracks or two clicks to select albums, pushing the knob back home will hold all functions so you cannot accidentally hit the controls, which I think is good. With the knob clicked out you can also paddle away at the two tabs alongside to change the volume. All is quite easy to use and understand, there are two additional small buttons alongside the EL screen for a search menu and display changes along with the two repeat and sound buttons round the back. These buttons are small for me to use and I have tiny hands so someone with big chubby sausages for fingers might have difficulty in using these buttons, that said thought the functions are minor ones and I don't use them much. Overall controls and use of the E407 are straight forward when in your hands, but more difficult on the belt or if you have large hands.

The headphones that are supplied with the unit are not the best, indeed they were so bad I bought some more as the supplied phones were uncomfortable and kept on falling out of my ears. Not great considering the price I paid, however I did splash out on some new mid range Sony headphones which were much better. The sound quality from the supplied headphones was decent enough, but the newer headphones were much better. The volume only needs to be around the 12 or 15 mark to block out most of the surrounding sounds yet the supplied headphones do not produce to much background noise. So the sounds are good, but the supplied headphones are not really up to scratch and my may find it best to buy some replacements.

The E407 has an internal battery that can be charged up when you plug in the USB connector to a computer. It charges up the battery and Sony claim a three minute charge from flat gives you three hours playback. A charge from flat to full will take a lot longer up to nearly twenty minutes, but for this you get a huge quoted 50 hours play back time. I personally think that this is longer as we took this on holiday and used it almost all the time for two weeks and we never charged it once. So far all is good, but now I move onto it's weak link.

For some reason Sony are still pushing their Atrac3 file system which is not the greatest. For earlier flash media players this was all you could use, however they have now allowed you to put MP3 files on the E407. This could be good, but the file management system supplied on the CD is the only I have found to transfer files. The management system is called 'SonicStage 3' which is I'm afraid to say a poor program. Firstly you have load up the programme onto your PC and then you have to import tracks from another source, CD or media files. The importing part is okay and doesn't take long around 30 seconds for media on your PC longer from a CD. The only problem with the import is it separates up files according to artist as well as album. So a greatest hits album has many numerous entries, if you load this straight onto the E407 you get massive list of albums with the same name. You can take each track and put them into one album block, but this takes even more time and I would prefer it if the file manager didn't do this separation. It even does it on albums that have extra contributors such as Gorillaz's album Demon Days, it's all a bit of a pain really.

Next up comes the real bug bear when you try and transfer files from the 'SonicStage 3' file manager library to the E407. This part is tediously slow and is like sitting still in a car on the M25 waiting for two hours whilst the accident in front of you gets cleared up. If you've been there you know what I mean if you haven't go and make a cup of tea whilst it transfers files, it takes that long. I tend to select and load up tracks that I what rather than whole albums as I don't want to play around with deleting tracks later. Other than that the amount of files the E407 can take is impressive and I have managed to place around 700MB on the unit and still have lots of various tracks for me and Mrs Cad.

I think I have covered most items here when using this player and overall I do like my purchase. The E407 is very nice to look at, easy to use most of the time, light weight and small, has a huge battery life and produces a nice crisp sound when you have decent headphones. The downs sides are the headphones that are supplied with the unit and the poor file transfer between a PC and the flash player is slow and clunky to use. It would be so much easier to transfer if I could drag and drop files without having to mess around and edit or move files. So I give it four stars for a good effort, but I don't think it is an I-Pod killer.

~Authors side note~
You'll be glad to know this is my last review for sometime as I am off on my holidays soon. The draft box is now empty so I cam fill it with opinions of my travels. As a mini competition can you guess where I'm going, there are clues in my last few reviews. There's a prize into for any correct answers in my guest book.

Thanks for reading, rating and commenting. Party on dudes!

Martin 

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