Sony Walkman NW-A1000 6 GB

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I have been dying to get an Mp3 player for ages but having trouble deciding on which one to get. After a very impulsive day today I decided to pop over to Argos to get the new Argos book and to check out the prices of the new Mp3's. What I wasn't expecting was to be walking out of Argos with a little box which just cost my credit card an arm and a leg!

Price and packaging
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Well I paid £159.99pence for this Sony Mp3 player earlier on today. This was from my local Argos store but I am not sure if its available cheaper else where. Argos are usually pretty good so for the hassle of looking everywhere I usually stick to buying bits there.

It comes in a fairly sturdy black case with all the bits bagged up inside.

What it comes with
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Well inside the box obviously is the little Mp3 player itself. There is the charger adapter and wall plug. The USB cable and a software CD. Now at first I though I was missing a piece for the charger but on looking in the little "getting started" leaflet I found that the USB cable was also used for the charging the little thing.

You are able to charge the Mp3 player wither by using the USB cable plugged into your computer and it charges off that or use it with the adaptor to charge from a wall outlet. I thought being able to charge it through your computer was pretty handy.

I was expecting to see a big instruction booklet but it appears that all the information is on a PDF file (which I have since found out is on a disk!). There was a small leaflet as I said called the "getting started" booklet and this gives you enough basic information (with diagrams) to help you get your Mp3 charged, instillation CD installed and your first tunes put on the little thing!
Mp3 player itself
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Well the Mp3 player unit itself looks really smart. It can come in three different colours (purple, black or silver) . I chose the black version as I think this one looked the best. Compared to other Mp3's I have seen it is a little bigger but it does have a 6gb memory and a great display. It still is really light and you wouldn't know you even had it in your pocket!

Its about ¾ of an inch thick and about 15cm long. The screen which displays all the track information is a good size at about a inch and a half squared so you can see a lot of information. You get the track name, album name, artist name and what genre it comes from along with duration of track and what number it is in the index of the Mp3 , this is all displayed on the black and blue screen!.

The buttons which are on the front are very easy to use. You have a back button, options button and a play/pause/forward/ backward directional button. There is a volume and a hold on the side along with a artist link button. This button, when you have linked artists and genres will play (if pressed) similar types of songs by different people. This is a pretty handy button when you are in the mood for just one type of music!

It comes with a set of earphones which are much like any other earphones I have used. They are made up of two wires which is like an extension lead for the earphones. Not sure if that's really necessary though. The earphones sit fairly well in my ears. I don't find earphones very comfortable in general but these are fairly well fitting ones.
Ease of Use
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Well I have never been one for all this reading instructions before use, so I plunged straight in. After all, you have to find your way around these things somehow, and trial and error has worked for me so far!

I started by charging the thing for around half an hour just to give it some life so I could start downloading some of my music right away. Half hour or charging gave it two bars of life, that's out of 5, so I had plenty of time to get transferring my files.

I inserted the disc that came with the Mp3 player and it guided me through installation as a disc like this usually does. It said it would take between 20 and 30 minutes depending on my internet connection speed as it needs to connect to the web to download new updated software. It took less time than that even with rebooting my system. When I logged back in I opened up the "Connect Player" program, that's the software for transferring the music files from the computer to the Mp3 player, I found it fairly straight forward.

When it opened up it instantly asked me if I would like to scan my system for music files to automatically transfer them over to the Mp3. I said yes to this and it began transferring all 534 tracks from my PC to the Mp3. I went to do the washing up while it was transferring and it took in total around 35 minutes to send over all those songs! I think that it was pretty fast considering how many tracks that actually is!

I can now keep the music files that are on my computer linked up to my Mp3 player. Each time I plug it in to charge (using the PC to charge seemed a lot easier) it will automatically update the music files on the Mp3 player if I have downloaded some to my PC. So I can keep both with the same music on.

I think this is the best thing to do and not to fart around with which album I want to put on and which I don't. It has such a high memory capacity that I don't think I will have to worry about how many albums I can fit onto it.
Specifications
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• Hard disc drive.
• 20 hours playback.
• 6GB memory.
• Stores up to 3900 tracks (48 KB per second).
• WMA/MP3 plus ATRAC 3 PLUS compatible.
• Play list, repeat, shuffle, artist list, hold, AVLS functions.
• 6 band equalizer.
• LCD display with 9 icons.
• USB port.
• USB cable supplied.
• Connect play software supplied.
• Minimum PC specification CPU: Pentium III 450 MHz, RAM: 128 MB, HDD: 200 MB * free disk space.
• In ear headphones (supplied).
• Built in rechargeable battery.
• AC adaptor.
• Weight 109g.
• Size (H)8.8, (W)5.5, (D)1.87cm.

General use
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Well now I have started trying to get fit I can use this when I am out on my walks. This is exactly what I did this evening and found having this Mp3 player a delight .

The sound quality is great and the volume seems to go up really loud. You can chose which type of sound you want, like basss, pop etc which in another bonus. The sound is clear and i cant fault it at all.

There are different types of options that you can chose to play various tracks. You are able to choice a specific album or a particular artist. You can play the tracks randomly or by year when they were released. You can chose to play alphabetically or again by genre. These are all great options for having when you are in different moods.

Each track can be rated by you 1 to 5 in order of how much you like it so you can then play just your favourite tracks. I think this will be useful as there are always a couple of weak tunes on most albums so if you get the time to rate each track on each album individually you can cut out all the not so good tracks!Overall
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Well I think this is a great new gadget and so far I have had no problems, not that I have had it for long at all. It has been so simple to use and I think I will only continue to find out handy little options I can use on it.

Its storage capacity is fantastic and I am going to try to get all my albums I own on to it! The amount of different options I have found to use so far has been really amazing and I am really happy with this Mp3 player all round.

This is the first Mp3 player that I have had but I think its great and I just want to be out walking all the time! For the money it seems a fair price although I am sure they will drop in price quite a lot over the next yearor so.

I am so far really pleased with this purchase and hope I don't have any problems with it. I have read some other reviews that seem to give the impression that the software is not brilliant. I have had no problems the way I have done it, so I am happy.

I would rate this product 9/10 I would only minus a point for the fact its not got one particular outstanding thing about it but overall, I think 9/10 is pretty good

I hope this has been of some help and been easy to read. I am not overly technical minded so have written this review based on how I found the product.

Thanks for reading

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