About me:Hi my names iain and i am a knolagable man constantly reviewing products and looking and finding out...
Member since:17.01.2007
Reviews:6
Review rated by 4 Ciao members on average: somewhat helpful
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Organic display? What the hell does that mean? It turns out that it means that there doesn't look like there is a screen, but there is. Its very cunning. It looks like the information is being displayed on the side of the player. I.e. you are looking at the front of the player and it says, Track 8 and has a progress bar, and that sort of thing, ON THE FRONT OF THE PLAYER ITSELF. The screen is seamless with the rest of the fascia. There is no LCD area. Look at the image of the player and then realise that the text you see is not just fixed text, it changes as the track changes.
We weren't all that convinced by Sony's NW-HD5 rotating screen antics, but the Organic Display on the NWA series is sooo cool.
Artist Link enables you to have the Walkman suggest tunes similar to the one you are currently listening too. It does this through a not-very-cunning random selection based on the genre of the music, but this feature still can either work out with some magic notions, or being annoying depending entirely on the user's mood - if you're in a good mood the suggestions seem to range form the inspired to the quirky; if you're in a bad mood its all no, no, no! until you want to fling it across the room. Teenagers should probably avoid using it.
'My favourite shuffle' - now this is a brilliantly simple idea. It creates a playlist (automatically) of your most favourite - i.e. most listened too - music tracks, and when you select my favourite shuffle it plays them in a random order. Its like having an iPod shuffle built-in to a fully functional unit. In truth you can make such a playlist yourself on any dukebox, but this feature keeps the 'most listened too' list up-to-date for you.
Time machine shuffle - ha ha ha! Another novelty, yes, that you could do yourself, yes, but once again the Sony dukebox does it for you. It allows you to select a year: 1989, for example, and then it will play randomly selected tracks that were released that year. Note: its not necessarily tracks that were hits that year. If, for example a song was released on the album in 1989, but was a hit during the summer of 1990, it may get played under the 1989 time machine shuffle, but not he 1990 time machine shuffle. Great feature for people with wide ranges of music from many years.
Navigation Sony haven't opted for a copy of the famous Apple click-wheel/ text-menu or the fabulously intuitive and pretty Archos AVOS system, but they have managed to make a menu system that is smart and very user friendly. Features like 'play history' are great for finding tunes that you listened to last week, but cannot remember what they are called; 'recently transferred' lets you browse through the music you have recently added - frequently the music you are most interested in.
Another similar big feature is the Initial Search, which allows you to look for Artists by their initials, or scroll through in an A-Z like fashion. Another good one for those 'I can remember the band's name starts with an M, but that's all' moments. Not ground breaking and present in most dukebox models.
Other comments On the original TV commercial the device seems to grow from a minuscule and improbably small player into the full sized Sony Walkman. That doesn't happen in real life.
There are 2 different sizes though: The 3 sets of player are almost exactly the same, except in terms of capacity and size. The 6GB and 8GB Walkman NW-A 1000 and 1200 are 8.8 cm tall; 5.5 cm wide, and 2.14cm thick verses the 20GB Walkman NW-A 3000 which is 10.4cm tall; 6.52 cm wide and 2.14cm thick.
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17.01.2007 11:13
Copies really aren't helpful : http://www.duke-box.com/sony-nwa1000-nwa3000-review.php