 Excellent sound quality!, 2010-02-01
I have owned this for a little over a month now.
Overall, I am very pleased with it. I wanted a mobile music player that included a radio, so the ipod was not an option for me.
The sound quality is really excellent with the supplied earphones. I suspect that it might be even better with different earphones, but I have not explored the options thoroughly yet. My wife has an ipod and I consider the sound quality to be noticably better on the Walkman. One point - you might need to play around a bit with the inbuilt equaliser. It took me a few hours of playing with it to get a sound that was good for my ears.
The radio reception is great, the presets work fine, although it would be nice if the names of the stations were displayed.
I am not using the video function yet, but the demos on the walkman look very good.
I think that it is worth getting the 32gb version as it is suprising how quickly you can use up the memory if you store your cds on it at high quality.
The build quality feels good.
Battery life is suprisingly good before it needs to be recharged.
wonderful mp3 player, 2010-01-19
I recently bought the sony walkman after having my previous samsung yp-3p stolen, and I am more than happy about the purchase. All the good points mentioned in the other reviews are 100% true and for the bad points highlighted, I guess I find mainly the lack of a "on-the-fly" playlist is a little annoying. I am not interested in using the player for much other than music, although the feature to access utube etc is quite cool and I found it pretty fast if a good wifi connection is available. Most important for me was however that the walkman is one of the very few high gb players that have come out that is compatible with the Napster to go subscription service. Apply products are not compatible and even the new Zen Creative touch screen player does not work with Napster. So if you like me spend a lot of time looking for new music to try or old music to rediscover, this is a great player, in addition to all the technical excellence. Finally, prices have recently come down, making it not bad value for money too
A superb Music Player, 2010-01-30
First some background -
My first MP3 player was a Creative Zen Juke Box 30gb which did what it said on the tin - great sound quality, very reliable and a replaceable battery - no gimmics. When it died a year ago I bought a 32gb Creative X-Fi which initially seemed great (especially as Amazon at that time were selling them for £149.95) - so many extras like FM tuner with station labelling, expansion card slot, onboard speaker, great picture and video capability - and most importantly of all great sound quality. I even got used to all the little buttons which worked quite logically. However after 10 months of battling with the Creative Software I had to surrender. The low point was when I had over 4000 tracks on it but when linked to my PC it would not communicate properly with Creative Centrale which said that it only had 300 tracks. This made it impossible to edit or make playlists. So Amazon came to the rescue (what great service they give) after failed attempts to get help from Creative - they refunded me and I bought the Super Sony NWZX1060B X Series 32GB MP4 Walkman with WiFi. Again I struck very lucky with Amazon who at one time were charging about £285 - but the week I ordered it they had it available at around £193 for the 32gb model - an absolute bargain!!
So what about the player - well I bought it purely for playing my music and wanted reliablity with top notch sound quality. Before I ordered it I checked out the sound quality in the Sony shop and then tried an i-Touch in the Apple shop using my own headphones each time. I must say in my opinion the i-Touch sounded quite unpleasant and harsh compared to the Sony which sounded simply wonderful - even with my basic Sennheisers. For me the Sony was far superior.
Now I have been using the player for a while my opinion is that it sounds even better than I first thought. You hear instruments that you could not hear before - the sound is clear yet not harsh or shrill - the bass is superb and if you use the earphones provided which also have noise cancelling capability the sound is just phenomenal.
So what about the extras - the radio is very good - no station labelling but that is not important. Then there are the wireless capabilities with YouTube access etc. Well when it works YouTube is fun but I did not buy it for these extras.
Regarding software it relies on Windows Media Player 11 - this seems to work well. There are some restrictions in that playlists have to be made on your PC and then imported and deleting tracks has to be done on your PC. But these slight inconveniences pale into insignificance if what you want is a stunning music player which is exactly what it is.
Note to Manufacturers - if you stripped out all the unecessary bits like wi-fi etc and just made a great music player (which this is) with perhaps just FM (or eventually DAB) you could bring the cost down. It is like mobile phones these days - they attempt to do so many things that many of us do not want/need - yet all the extras must add cost to the product.
So you pays your money and make your choice - as they say - at present the price has gone up quite a bit so that is a factor if funds are tight - but if you want just great sound quality for your music look no further than the Sony.
Love it apart from options to turn off....., 2010-02-10
....by which I mean that even if you power off, it only powers down and according to the manual will only turn off completely if not used for a day. I have always bought Sony MP3 players and been pleased with them all, this is no exception, a great player, but why no facility to completely switch it off....I only want it to use power when I use it, not when it's lying around. Twice now I have had the player on a full charges but had it in my backpack and presumably, even though the hold tab is on, it must be constantly being powered on by pressing against other items in the bag and I end up with a flat battery...it's not a mobile...it's an MP3...it doesn't need a standby option....not for me anyway. Other than this one gripe...superb player.
Brilliant!, 2010-01-12
Where to begin?
Well, I love my player, I think it's excellent, and with all honesty, much better than the Apple equivalent (iPod Touch), not only because of the lower price, but the sound quality, functionality and user interface, as well.
I did have a couple of problems, though. Not major ones, but they're worth taking note of. First of all, this is not to do with the actual player, but the "Easy i" case I purchased was extremely tight on it, and covered up the HOLD button. However, that wasn't a big problem. I tried the WiFi on the player, and, despite my rather fast MODEM, it was awful! Very slow, and most webpages wouldn't even work! However, after a month or so of owning the player, Sony released an update which transformed the internet browser to no end. Do not listen to the other reviews that claim the internet browser doesn't work, as that was before this update had been released. I don't know how many people's internet problems it has fixed, but it's definitely fixed mine, as it's not quick, easy to use, and fun! The update can be found on the Sony website, although I found it rather difficult to find, you've gotta go into the details of the player, and then onto a page on all its updates.
Furthermore, the sound quality and picture quality are excellent, and the touch screen is practically perfect (I cannot fault Apple for their iPod's touch-screen, but I'd say the X Series' touch is 95% as good).
The YouTube feature works very well, and it even worked before the update was installed. The way it links songs, artists, and albums to YouTube is faultless.
In addition, the noise-cancelling works a treat, even though you can't really tell it's on if you're in a quiet room, you will definitely be able to in a bus/train etc.
Finally, the FM radio works very well, as expected, but it's nothing special.
Overall, I think this is a fantastic product, and a great buy. I bought it off Amazon, and it came with a free recording dock (worth £80), which I've also found extremely useful, so I'm very happy.
The player's so much more worth it than an iPod, and I'm not even suggesting that an iPod's not "worth it".
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