Before I start and sound like a typical IPOD fanatic I bought the Sony because I hate the idea of being a sheep and carry round an unimaginatively designed block of white plastic.
As there seemed few alternatives and I'm a huge Sony fan I opted for the small, well-designed 20gb NW-HD3.
It arrived, I unboxed it, put it on to charge and sat looking at this lovely well built, sturdy MP3 player which by all accounts has a 20+ hour battery life, 20GB HDD and look so unlike an IPOD it HAD to be great.
Then came the time to install it and use it, my joy rapidly turned to anger and frustration.
I started by installing the supplied SonicStage software, as soon as it had finished installing and I loaded it up my memory shot me back to when I purchased a Song MD player that had the same software. I though to myself, nah Sony HAVE to have improved it and fixed all of the bugs, boy was I WRONG.
I have a reasonably large collection of CD's (over 400) which I have spent many hours converting to MP3 so that I can have PC jukebox on the stereo at home, make MP3 compilations for the car and of course put the music on to my portable MP3 player. SonicStage simply take forever to catalogue the songs and most of the time hangs without you knowing what is happening to scared to reboot the PC in case you have to start the process all over again. I downloaded the updated software, which showed little improvement. Eventually it finished, but you have to go through such a commotion to add new albums that you have put on there. The transfer rate to the device leaves a lot to be desired as well, it would be better if you could line everything up, click go and walk away but as soon as you start adding your PC grinds to a crawl while you try and select the rest of the music you want. (Please consider I'm running 3.2ghz with 1gb of RAM so it's not a slow PC)
When you do get the music onto the MP3 player its sounds fine (throw away the headphone that it comes with and get a descent set). However Sony generously limit the output volume to protect your ears, unfortunately they have over done this and even with very good headphones if your sat on a train you can hear what is going on around you instead of just sitting back and enjoying your own music.
The final nail in the coffin is that now virtually all car stereos can take an adapted to connect an IPOD of which many can be controlled from the head unit. This is not the case with the Sony.
Well after my opening comment I have now come to the conclusion that I must tuck tail between legs and look at selling the Sony in favour of the IPOD (which by the way also has improved cataloguing options)
2 Stars, nice try but Sony you HAVE to do better next time.
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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.
Apr 12th, 2006
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