FreeLists / blindipod / [blindipod] New Sony MP3 walkman

["Brian Hartgen" <brian.hartgen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi

Some of you may have heard of a new series of Sony walkmans available which
are portable media players.  I had the opportunity yesterday of viewing the
units and I thought I would give my impressions here.

One thing which is unique about the players, and why they are worth
describing, is that you can in fact download purchased music from the Sony
music store and play it on one of the units.  Of equal importance, these
players are at the moment becoming very popular with the public as sony of
course are traditionally well-known for producing players of a high audio
quality.

The player itself comes in two sizes, both from a hard drive capacity and a
physical perspective. The 6 GB model is extremely small, and is in the
colours violet, silver, pink and blue.  It is priced at between £120 and
£150 depending upon where you purchase it.
If anyone is interested, I will try and get some dimensions. The 20 GB model
is a little larger than the previous model, and is priced from between £160
and £200. You can obtain it in the colours violet, black and silver.  The
colour of the headphones naturally matches the unit.

Here are a few items probably unique to the players.

The WALKMAN features a revolutionary new ARTIST LINK function. This means
that if you?re listening to an artist or track and you press the artist link
button
the new WALKMAN will search, find, play and display similar artists in that
genre.

What?s more, you can also choose how to ?shuffle?. By selecting ?My
Favourite Shuffle?, the device automatically selects the most listened to
100 songs
and plays them at random. The ?Time Machine Shuffle? function randomly
selects a year and plays all of the songs from that particular year that are
currently
held on the device.

The battery life is reported to be up to 35 hours before needing a recharge.

The player from a tactile point of view seemed as easy to use as other
similar devices, that is to say I could easily navigate through tracks using
two out of the three buttons on the unit.  Much of the functionality centres
a round a joystick-type button to move up, down, left and right, and
pressing it in the centre is play/stop.

After switching the unit on, I was confronted with the main screen.
Pressing the down arrow took me to the music library, whereupon I could
enter the menu.  The first list after that is albums which can be navigated
through with the left and right arrow, but I was also able to arrow down to
artist, and then use the left and right arrow to move through the artists.
So the fact is this player relies more it seemed on grouping material
together by album or artist.

As I say, like many players, operating this non-visually will require some
memory.  I think however this is possible, and I was able to use it with
success in the Sony Centre where I was looking at this device.

I was not however able to try the Sony Connect software, which is essential
for transferring music onto the player and indeed to purchase material from
the Sony music store.  So quite how accessible this would be I have no idea.
However, this could be worth investigating further, possibly because it
could well be easier to access the music store than iTunes.

I hope this has been interesting, and if you want to know any more about the
players, I will try and answer the queries.

Brian Hartgen

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