I got a Sony NW-A1000 for Christmas a couple of years ago but I ran out of space so sold it and bought this one to replace it. I have to say I much prefer this model. This is a
Advantages: - So much space. I've got over 3000 songs on it including a lot of podcasts which take up more room, and I've only used about half of the space on it.
- Good quality sound. I put songs on with an 80kbs bit rate which is low (standard is 128, 192) but the quality is still good.
- Very robust. I dropped this once onto concrete and kicked it accidentally; it hasn't done any damage to the MP3 except for denting the outer casing. It still works fine.
- The screen is clear and easy to follow and the button layout is nice.
- Long battery life, I was impressed with how long it takes before the battery needs to be recharged. The blocks on the battery symbol in the screen go down quite quickly but when it gets to the last block it will stay on it for a very long time. Also skipping songs regularly will use more battery, so I have learned to pause songs and scroll through which seems to work better for some reason.
- The headphones that it comes with are nice, clear and look quite stylish.
Disadvantages: - Can be a bit hard to scroll through all your music and find a specific artist and song, especially when you have so much. Apple have obviously nailed it with their scroll wheel and the Sony NW-A1000 has the alphabet letter jump. On this though you have to go up and down through all the songs/artists.
- The software that is comes with is Sonic Stage. This is not the best as it doesn't remove all the songs that you have taken off the library. You need to delete them from the MP3 itself. Still this software is ten times better than Connect Player.
- Because of the colour, scratches can look more noticeable and ruin the overall look.
- Scrolling - can be quite hard to get used to. When clicking up or down to scroll through songs there are different speeds of scrolling. Once you have grasped this though it is easy to work.
Overall a very good, spacious and robust MP3 player which I certainly preferred to over the NW-A1000 which I wasn't content with. A good buy even though its now quite dated and there are newer models.
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Advantages: 40 hr battery life, plays mp3 and atrac music files and can be used as a hard drive to store other files. Disadvantages: new shape has lost some of the uniqueness of the earlier models. won`t play wma files
Advantages: Small, massive battery life, decent buttons, looks great and great sound Disadvantages: low resolution screen, softwares a bit iffy at times
Oct 27th, 2007
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