18 years old, living in Suffolk and studying in Norwich.
18 years old, living in Suffolk and studying in Norwich.
Member since:13.06.2005
Reviews:1
Members who trust:1
Having had a 256MB player, I decided I needed much more storage for my ever expanding music collection. After months of research, I had decided that the iPod nano had too little storage and the Creative Zen was too expensive. Another option, the Samsung YP - 25 was cheap, but didn't have enough storage.
It was then that I came across the Sony Walkman, on Dabs - where it had been reduced in price to £115.00. I decided, after yet more research that this was the player for me. I had used Sony products before, such as the cassette Walkman and their DiscmanCD player range, and they had always worked well. So, after much debating with myself, I took the plunge.
The Walkman finally arrived within 3 days. As expected with Sony, the packaging was very stylish. The box was purple, and shiny with "Connect" written on it. Inside was a black cardboard box embossed with the "Sony" logo, and inside inscribed with "Every moment has it's music". The packaging was presented well.
But enough of that, onto the actual player. It is very stylish, and incredibly small. The photo displays as larger as it is in real life, which is a shame as it is much smaller in real life, I can assure you. If size is an issue when buying an MP3 player, this is great as it is small but solid also.
Before buying this player, I had looked at the press photos from Sony, and thought it looked beautiful.
But upon seeing it for real, I can say that it is one of the most stylish players I have ever seen. Certainly more stylish than an iPod. The front surface is highly reflective and has a stylish glass look about it., with a purple screen. The screen is underneath, and looks like part of the player, both when switched on and off. The rear of the player is solid non reflective plastic. The sides of the player are silver. Whilst this player is very stylish, it does have the downside of being very susceptible to fingerprints, dust and some marks. These can be easily cleaned, and only really show up in sunlight. The player also may fall foul of scratches, so do invest in a carry case, and try to avoid putting the player in the same pocket as your keys.
The front of the player has 3 buttons on the front and two at each side. The front buttons are:
Play/Pause/Select - for playing songs, scrolling through the music library and the main player menu and for selecting a function/song.
Back - for returning to a previous menu, or when held down for a few seconds on Now Playing, accessing the main menu.
Option - to bring up the options menu.
The buttons on the side are Volume Control and Artist Link (more detail furthur on).
Upon switching on the player, a greeting flashes up along with the Walkman logo, which changes from time for example "Good music, good day". This is a nice touch, but not something very useful. When the player is switched on, it will automatically search for the last played track and pick up where it left off. This is very useful it I have had to turn off my player in the middle of a song and I want to come back to it without having to play it all over again. Very useful when at the petrol station!
To access the main menu, press and hold the back button. The menu is present in 3x3 icons (similar to the Sony Ericsson mobile interface) with the following functions:
Music Library - to access stored songs.
Playlists - for quick access to stored playlists.
Settings - for changing the main settings for the player, such as sound, volume restrictor, display settings, keypad sound, audio output, unit information, language and reset settings.
Top 100 - plays your 100 most played songs.
Play mode - changes your playing options e.g. shuffle/repeat.
Initial Search - allows you to search artists, albums and songs by letter. This is very useful if you don't want to trawl through the media library looking for something specific. I actually use this feature more than I use normal searching.
Intelligent Shuffle - this, in my view, is one of the major features of the player. It includes My Favourite Shuffle and Time Machine Shuffle (more detail about these later)
Play History - allows you to view you recent play history by date.
Now Playing - link back to the playing song.
Sony have put some very interesting features on this player. One of these is Intelligent Shuffle. Obviously Sony felt that there was a gap in the market for this.
The first feature is My Favourite Shuffle which complies all of the most played tracks and shuffles them. It's a nice to have feature but I don't use it all that often.
The other is Time Machine Shuffle, which is quite fun. The player compiles all of your tracks by year, and chooses a year at random, playing all the songs from that year. This infomation is supplied when CD's are ripped. It's actually a really nice feature, and now everyone has named my player "The Tardis" and "Back To The Future"!
Other features of the player include the facility to rate individual songs. Not used often, though.
Another feature is the ability to bookmark songs into an automatic playlist. This helps if you want to bookmark your favourite songs into one easily accessable playlist.
Artist Link is also useful. It allows you to search for artists/bands linked to the one you are currently listening to. This is also a nice to have feature, if you're interested in finding out about other artists linked to the one you are listening to.
In terms of sound performance, the player is superb. I expected this because Sony have plenty of experience in audio with previous Walkman products. It handles bass, mids and trebles very well. I really opened up this player on sound quality, using quite bass heavy songs and some classical music. It handled both very well. There were sometimes times when the bass was a little bit heavy, but that was soon rectified when changing the equaliser setttings.
The headphones supplied are fine for me, but if you're an audiophile, you'll probably want to use your own. Just a note on this - if you do use different headphones, you have to connect them using the wire Sony have supplied with the player to connect the headphones - they won't work otherwise! No idea why this is, but it is a little bit of an annoyance. Like I say, the supplied headphones are perfectly acceptable - and I'm pretty fussy about headphone quality.
Now the software. After reading other reviews, the software was described as being slow, buggy and prone to crashing a lot of the time.
I can now say that in my experience, this is untrue. It appears to me that Sony have improved the problems they had before. In fact, I found it much easier to use than iTunes. As I already had my music collection on the computer, it took me five minutes to convert all 518 songs into the Connect player. Syncing with the player took three minutes. If you are converting your songs into Atrac3 format, then this may take longer.
I would advise that you rip CDs on Windows Media Player, and then load them into your Connect player if you want to use WMA format. Windows Media Player is quicker at ripping CDs.
Note on this - my computer is three years old with 196MB RAM and an average processor, not one of the more powerful models!
The player comes with a USB connector and charger and an AC wall adapter. This is perfect for me as I don't wish to use my computer to charge up my player on the computer as it wastes resources.
The instruction manual was a little downfal for Sony, because it was in PDF format, and had to be read on the computer. This was a little annoying, but the player is very easy to use, so I didn't need to use a lot of it.
The only real issue with the player is that it doesn't support downloading services such as Napster or HMV digital. This could be a problem if you want to use these programs a lot. However, Sony do provide the Connect Store, which in my view is better as like iTunes, you only pay for what you download rather than subscribing to a service. But, on the other hand, I don't download lots of songs.
To summarise, this player is an absolute beauty, so easy to use and definatly recommended for people who want a simple player to play music and with a little more.
Highly recommended.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Good review, very detailed. I have one of these (and very stylish it is too!). It's a shame because they don't make these any more - the new one looks more like an iPod without the glass front. :-(
COOOEEE 23.06.2006 15:18
That was an impressive first review and I’m sure you're going to do well here. If you would like to add to or change any part of your review in the future you can do this by pressing the edit link on the right hand side of the page as you read your review. Fionaxx
Advantages: Beautiful to hold, looks great, Its very strong, sturdy, massive storage space on a HDD Disadvantages: Sony connect is painfully slow and unreliable, some might find the EU noise reduction limit annoying.
Advantages: Beautiful to hold, looks great, Its very strong, sturdy, massive storage space on a HDD Disadvantages: Sony connect is painfully slow and unreliable, some might find the EU noise reduction limit annoying.
Advantages: Looks pretty, Different sound options, fits in pocket Disadvantages: Battery gets worse, difficult to delete songs, difficult to get songs onto mp3
Jun 21st, 2006
very helpful by (100%):
