To celebrate my 1st month without nicotine I decided to use my new found wealth to join up at a gym.
Unable to find a willing victim to join me, I took a trip down to my local electrical retailer to find an in ear companion of musical sorts. Out of the huge array of devices on offer, I decided upon the smallest player so as to maximise practicality.
Once I had used the unit for a week I can now summise what exactly I had bought for my money:
The unit comes with 512MB of memory which is not large by todays standards but ample enough for say 100 tracks of MP3's at 192Khz bit rate. Obviously more can be stored at a lower bit rate but at the sacrifice of quality. Sonys own ATRAC3 can also be used but its best to keep your tunes in the format they were ripped at to ensure quality is not lost.
As you would expect from Sony the sound quality is rather good with quite an emphasis on the lower bass region and little distortion when pushed. Albeit after the first day I binned the supplied mediocre earphones and purchased some new Sennheisers. My only gripe would be a slight lack of power, but considering the weight and size of the unit, is understandable.
The E002 is finished to a high standard and the semi opaque screen that is only visble when the unit is operated is a rather 'trick' feature. To operate the unit is fairly straight forward with only a couple of buttons which are perhaps a touch too small but nonetheless are not easily pressed accidentally, however there is a more traditional 'hold' slide switch on the rear to prevent this. The unit itself is very discreet and weighs about the same as and is fractionally larger than a standard USB memory stick. Frustratingly there is a facility to attach a lanyard or wrist strap but nothing supplied with unit. Perhaps a belt clip on the back of the unit would have made it a bit more secure for using on the move.
Battery life is quite surprising considering the claims of a 3 minute charge = 3 hour playback. Needless to say a quick getaway is not hampered by the charge cycle. I would say, though, that playback varies depending on volume and usage.
To transfer your tunes the unit simply plugs into the usb port on your pc using the built in USB interface on the unit ( Covered by a cap when not in use). Conveniently this is how the unit is charged. The transfer process itself is rather quick when using the USB 2 protocol, obviously file size has an influence, but overall is more than fast enough. My only reservation is the the software that you must use to transfer your music files to the device is Sony's own Sound Stage is truly awful. It is slow, crashes and generally inconvenient. I still cant fathom why a simple drag and drop interface cant be used as with a conventional memory stick and some other brands of flash memoryMP3 players. There are many similar complaints on the WWW regarding the software with some other alternatives that can be used in its place should you wiash to venture down that road. But for simplicity and not so frequent need for transferring a fresh batch of tunes every week the software fulfills my needs.
To conclude I would heartily recommend the unit as an introduction to portable MP3 players for those people who perhaps may use occasionally. I would recommend purchasing some new 'phones though.
For those who are more frequent listeners to music on the go I would suggest spending a bit more money and until the software is rewritten I would almost certainly avoid anything from the Sony camp and perhaps jump on the chic Ipod bandwagon !
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Sep 1st, 2006
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