I'm a 22 and from the North West. Gadget mad, always looking for the new piece of electronic equipme...
I'm a 22 and from the North West. Gadget mad, always looking for the new piece of electronic equipment. I'm always wary of buying expensive stuff without consulting reviews, hence why I've started spreading my word here to help other people
Member since:15.03.2007
Reviews:16
I bought this a while ago, sometime after I sold my iPod, as I wanted a good sized drive for all my music and something nice and compact to take camping with me or use in the car. This Walkman does ticks all of those boxes.
I had a, now obsolete, iPod Mini with 2GB storage, and this for a lot cheaper has 6GB and looks a lot more stylish with it's bright white screen underneath the plastic casing - which is a very attractive design feature.
The main buttons include a menu button, a 5 way navigation button with 4 arrows and a middle enter/play button and a back button. There is also a hold button on the top and an 'artist link' button (exclusive to Sony walkmans) on the left side of the walkman. The charger and USB connection port is located on the bottom of the unit, with the headphone port on the top. The unit measures only 80mm by 55mm (considerably smaller than my old iPod) and feels a lot lighter.
The software on the walkman is very simple to use with the navigation arrows and enter buttons, you can search for songs, artists or albums by initial, play all the songs, play recently transferred songs or use the intelligent shuffle feature (which I believe is also only found on Sonys) which will play you a particular genre or year that you select - the year is a very nice feature.
The now playing screen is very informative, tells you the artist name, song title, album and playlist. It also tells you the length of song via a progress bar and the number the song is in the current playlist.
The unit has a number of good sound settings, it has the ability to produce a line out to connect to your hifi or any other external speaker source which you can then use the volume control on rather than the walkman itself and it has some good preset equaliser settings.
The only downside is the software that is originally supplied with these walkmans, it is very slow to transfer music and difficult to use. I didn't use it for long until I discovered that sony had released an updated version of the software (now called SonicStage) which is a lot easier to use and now works brilliantly. So my advice would be to forget the CD supplied with the walkman and install SonicStage (which is available through Sony's main site, or just google it)
Overall though, the Sony NW-A1000 walkman is an excellent competitor to the Apple iPod and in my opinion has a lot more useful features on it, such as the intelligent shuffle and the artist link facility. It also has a very good sized 6GB hard drive which is quick and can hold thousands of songs. The iPod does have the easier to use click wheel navigational tool, however, the walkman is still easy to navigate using standard 5-way buttons, it just may take slightly longer.
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i have the older 20gb sony walkman and its fanstatic...better than the ipod, just cause it does what it says its an mp3 player! very good review. gaunty
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: Great features, plenty of room for your fave music! Disadvantages: Disapointing software, not great for slow computers (may not even work).
Advantages: Looks pretty, Different sound options, fits in pocket Disadvantages: Battery gets worse, difficult to delete songs, difficult to get songs onto mp3
Mar 16th, 2007
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