Sony Walkman NW-E015 2 GB

Over the years Sony have been knocking out great electronic gear. Games machines, stereos, T.Vs, mobile phones the list is endless. They're even a major player in the music business.

But even with this long line of distinguished history when it comes to the digital music player area they're just not good enough. It's not the way the player looks, I think they look modern, stylish and very sleek. There isn't a problem with the sound ...
...So now we have the Sony 2GB NW-E015. It's pretty similar to previous players. And you still have to use that dreadful SonicStage. You have to use it to add tracks to the player. You can't drag and drop tracks to it from your hard drive. I find this so annoying. Firing SonicStage takes way to long. After it's finally loaded it starts updating information about your player. When you do get around to adding tracks to it you have to wait around waiting ... more

Over the years Sony have been knocking out great electronic gear. Games machines, stereos, T.Vs, mobile phones the list is endless. They're even a major player in the music business.

But even with this long line of distinguished history when it comes to the digital music player area they're just not good enough. It's not the way the player looks, I think they look modern, stylish and very sleek. There isn't a problem with the sound quality, the Sony players I've owned have all had brilliant sound quality. So, what is it that's ruining it for them? Well, it's the software you MUST use for transferring music and sorting out your music. SonicStage. To put it politely SonicStage just isn't and can't compete with iTunes.

So now we have the Sony 2GB NW-E015. It's pretty similar to previous players. And you still have to use that dreadful SonicStage. You have to use it to add tracks to the player. You can't drag and drop tracks to it from your hard drive. I find this so annoying. Firing SonicStage takes way to long. After it's finally loaded it starts updating information about your player. When you do get around to adding tracks to it you have to wait around waiting for it to update the track information. If you're going to be adding WMA tracks to it there's more waiting around as it starts converting the track to it's format. This results in loss of quality.

SonicStage doesn't support file paths longer than 250 characters. Yeah, I doubt you will have a title that long. But if you have a huge folder structure leading to where your music is stored you've pretty much had it. It will refuse to carry out the transfer.

O.k, I'll get to a good point. The sound quality. It's 10x better in my opinion than anything in it's class. In either ATRAC 3 or MP3 encoding it doesn't disappoint. If you are going to be using a pair of decent quality headphones you will definitely notice the improved quality of the ATRAC format. Another great feature is the battery life. I manged to get 30+ hours out of mine. Brilliant for people who spend lots of time away from home. Even when it finally does run out, you wont be waiting to long as it charges up quickly. I also found "jacket" mode very useful. You browse your music by album art instead of text titles. Only problem is that when you flick through it interrupts the song you're listening to.

I personally think the player looks great. But I can see why some people wouldn't like it. It looks more like a cigarette lighter than a music player. The buttons are small and quite fiddly to use. Even more so if you don't have 20/20 vision. The USB cover kept falling off mine which always resulted in me searching my pockets or the area where I was listening to it. I had to use a piece of sticky tape to hold it on. They definitely need to come up with some sort of strap device.

To round this player up, you're going to be getting great sound quality for the price. But this player isn't anything to write home about. Maybe its the software Sony insist on you using that ruined my whole experience. 

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