I received one of these for my birthday, and as I had been hankering after an Mp3 player, was delighted that it was a Sony and even more pleased when I saw it was the latest and greatest.
I am a bit of a Sony fan - I have there TV's, have Sony CD players and generally perceive them to have a very strong reputation for excellent usability, excellent user interaces and above average sound/audio quality.
So you can imagine my disappointment then after spending my initial day with my Sony ND3...
First the good...(its shorter)
1. Its cute - its small, has a satisfying feel in the palm of my hand and generally looks ok
2. The sounds quality was good, as good as I get with my current Sony portalable CD player, and better than my Sony mini disc.
1. Sonic Stage - what an utter pile of rubbish!! There I was thinking that the software provided would allow me to seemlessly interface with my sexy new Mp3 player. It has crashed on me on a very regular basis, hangs at will and then comes back to life, and when I receive security updates from Windows, I have to cross everything and hope it has not broken. It appears that Sony would have be battle with this monster in order to load music. Why oh why could you just not drag and drop files onto the filesystem?
2. Cable choas - plugging the thing into your computer should be a painless process. However, with this you have one cable plugged into another cable which then slots into the ND3 with a connector that has a really annoying habbit of not wanting to disconnect. It looks messy and not really want I expect paying this much. Why could they not have had a simple cradle??
3. Usability/user interface - now as I said, am a big fan of Sony products normally. They have good interfaces and allow you to get the best out of the device. This thing.....uurrghh, words fail me. It took me a week before I knew how to do certain operations and the choice of buttons is very poor, including the location and operation of them. For example, I have for the umpteenth time got the plater out to find the battery depleted as the on switch was accidently pressed whilst in my pocket. Why could they not have a button you press and hold to switch on/off ?? The menus are confusing, and when you are listening to music at the same time, often the menus get messed up...
I could go on, but I have now reduced this little unit to being my portable hard disk between the office and home, and I store my word documents, source files on this as I trave back/forth from home.
I don't have the hear to take this back as it was a present, but next time I hope I just get the money and then I can choose a proper MP3 player that works.
Sorry Sony, this is just not good enough.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
You seem to have something wrong with your MP3 player, the battery life i get from mine is about 35 hours more then enough for a week of travelling for me, the MP3 player looks pretty nice as the other guy said, and I don't see what problems you have with the interface? Leave a message in my guestbook if you need help with it. Other than that an good first review.. Josh.
RicardoSueiras 09.03.2005 00:09
The battery life is ok, but not brilliant. I can get about 4-6 hours per charge, which is enough for my daily commute. Now that I am using it less as a player and more as disk storage, it is lasting longer, so I guess it depends on what you use it for.
By "cute" I mean that it is a very small, compact player, and it looks ok. However, this does not mean that it is well designed, as design is (mostly) about usability and that far outways (in my opinion) how good it looks - it was this that made me rate it poor, because it really is.
Hope that clears up the ambigous nature of my review.
Advantages: Great design, hi-quality sound (Better than iPod), easy to use, smaller than iPod, better software than iTunes. AMAZING battery life. Disadvantages: Menus on Walkman if you have a lot of albums to get through - are a little bit time consuming to navigate.
Mar 7th, 2005
very helpful by (6%):
helpful by (88%):
somewhat helpful by (6%):
