A nice hard drive MP3 player I have owned since it was released!
Sure, it's not the most feature packed MP3 player and the software supplied isn't favoured by everyone but it does it's job and has a very good battery life. At the time of release, the iPod was around 11 hours, whereas this was 20 hours. Considerable difference! I must admit the iPod did have the better user interface though but this one was perfectly fine! It was also about £30 cheaper than the iPod at the time if I remember right.
Something else this MP3 player does have that the iPod lacked was what Sony called "G-Protection". The idea was to protect the hard drive should the MP3 player be dropped using G sensors to sense if the MP3 player was dropped to remove the needle from the drive to prevent damage.
A small carrying pouch is also provided.
In use, you can select music to play by Artist, Album, Genre, New Tracks (most recent music loaded on to the MP3 player) or by bookmarked tracks.
Bookmarked tracks was unfortunately the only method of creating a playlist. If it was possible to make several different playlists of your favourite music, this would have earned some top points.
It can also be a pain scrolling through your music. It's not the quickest to search for your music if you have a lot of music on there. A search function would have been ideal.
It also doesn't just play MP3s. It also plays WAV files and Sony's own compression known as ATRAC. This is quite a nice compression for audio files. The file sizes are smaller than MP3 but still with a high quality sound allowing you to fit more music on there. I encoded all of my CDs at 64Kbps in ATRAC3plus and the quality was comparable to MP3s encoded at about 128-160Kbps, in my opinion.
The length of a review does not always gain the higher ratings, presentation and the information included are part of the overal feel to a well balanced review and the best way to see what is required in reviews is to read a few other reviews in the category you have written/writing in and not one particular members reviews, he is just touting for reads which is againt the rules
Davidhutt 18.06.2007 16:02
good review but if you want better ratings then you have to make it longer. Check out some of my reviews to see how long they should be to get very helpful and exceptional ratings. Dave
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.
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