The NW-A3000 is the first harddisk player I have seen which I actually like the appearance of. I looked at all the available colours in the shop before I chose and the black is definitely the most classy looking. I thought I would get a bit sick of the purple in a few months time, and I had trouble seeing the screen on the silver model, no such problems with this one though.
In the box you get the player, a cable to connect it to your computer , an adapter to charge the player via the mains and a few leaflets. You also get a driver and software CD which contains the user manual. I was a little disappointed by this, I still like to recieve a real paper manual, especially for a product this expensive.
The player itself looks and feels like a quality item. It has a nice
weight, has a nice smooth feel to it and fits perfectly in my hand. The controls fall in the right place for my fingers and are easy to use. The screen,although clear, is basic. It appears from behind the front cover in a light blue colour, and displays basic song information. No colour screens or photos here, but it obviously does help battery life, and displays all the information I need to see.
The menu's are simple and songs are easy to find using a first-letter search, or by scrolling through listings of artist, album and a few other gimmicky categories. Each song can be given a star rating manually, or you can let the player adjust these depending on how often you listen to them. The player has the normal play modes, including random, repeat and shuffle, but also has a few extras such as the time machine shuffle. I have only a single complaint about the user interface, it isnt as fast as I would like. This is most noticeable when trying to skip to the next track, the display shows the new song but you get about a seconds silence before it starts playing. Its not a biggy, but moving from an old sharp minidisc where this happened instantly I did notice it.
Using Sony's ATRAC3plus file format sound quality is amazing, I cannot fault it. Mp3's still sound good, but arent a patch on Sony's own format, and take up more space. The supplies ear phones have a good clear sound, but to me lack bass, and I found them very uncomfortable to wear. They dont come with any covers, which means hard plastic into the ear and when I did put some of my own covers on, they were too big to fit in my ears. Using my own ear phones with the A3000 gave just as good sound quality, but with more welcome bass. Personally I would have liked to see ogg vorbis support as this is what most of my music collection is in, and this meant re-ripping all my CD collection.
On to the software. Sony's new Connect software is an absolute nightmare. When I first installed the software it failed to check for an upgrade and left me with the original version of the software. I left the software over night importing my collection of mp3s, when I returned in the morning the program had crashed. After restarting, I found that songs I imported would not stay saved within the player. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software, but Sony saw fit leave almost all files on the system even after an uninstall, including registry values. I narrowed my problem down to corrupted registry values, and had to manually go through and delete them individually. When I re-installed after this, a new version of the software was found and installed, this works better than the original. Even though it now works, it still has a number of problems. Its very slow, even when nothing is happening just scrolling through a list of files seems to stress it out. It isnt very intuitive to use, its often hard to tell exactly what the software is currently doing, and getting it to do exactly what you want can be harder still, if not impossible. For example, if you want to rip a CD onto your walkman, you also have to save the ripped files onto your computer. For me, this is pointless as I already have my CD collection saved as ogg vorbis files, so naturally I just wanted to rip the CD directly onto walkman, it wont let me, I have to manually delete ripped files every time I import a CD.
When it comes to actually getting music from your CDs onto your Walkman, you may encounter some problems. The software has a habit of mis-reading audio CDs which also contain a data layer. If it does this, you will be shown the data layer, but no audio files, so you wont be able to rip your own CD. It also has trouble some audio CDs with copy protection on, even ones distributed by SonyBMG.
Like most music download sites, the Connect Music Store uses DRM crippled music files, and should be avoided at all costs.
To sum it up, I am extremely happy with the player, but extremely depressed with the Connect software. If you can live with having to put some effort into getting your music collection onto your walkman I couldnt recommend it enough.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Advantages: Looks Good, Good Sound, Large Memory, Sony (Reputable), Range of Features Disadvantages: Initially quiet, Can turn on in pocket, Sunlight makes text invisible, Software.
exceptional by (7%):
very helpful by (87%):
helpful by (7%):
