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Sony NWA3000 and NWA1000 Walkman Description and ReviewThe Sony NWAs have been replaced. The closest product currently available are the video-readySony NWZ 4GB and 8GB. The video Sony walkman NWZs available are:
Black 4GB Sony NWZA816B |
Pink 4GB Sony NWZA816P |
White 4GB Sony NWZA816W |
Black 8GB Sony NWZA818B |
Pink 8GB Sony NWZA818P |
White 8GB Sony NWZA818W
The below commentary is on the older NWAs We normally start the Sony general pages with "The Sony Walkman: the grand-daddy of them all", or in the case of the PSP: Pwahor! However, events of the last year have clouded our view of Sony somewhat. On this page we discuss the relative merits of the NWA 3000 NWA 1200 and NWA 1000 Sony Walkman MP3 player models.If you want to see what kind of shenanigans Sony have been up to at the end of 2005 click here. The NW-A3000 NW-A1200 and NW-A 1000 are the first to actually use the brand name Walkman
directly, written upon the device and not just in conjunction with other words,
such as Network. The fact that Sony has gone properly back to its roots, finally
made a very good modern Walkman and started taking the whole Portable Digital
Music Player market seriously is great news. It does beg the question: "What
took you so long?" Sony's past efforts have been from the bad to the mediocre
to the quite good, but none of them were stunning. None of them was the dukebox
equivalent of the Sony PSP
- i.e. a billion miles ahead of the competition. Why not? Constipation.
NWA - in the 1990's there was a(n in)famous band that used the Moniker NWA: Niggaz Wit Attitude. We checked to see if NWA's music is now being sold "Straight out of Nippon", but we could find no evidence to that effect. It looks like a coincidence. To the dukeboxes:The marketing bumpf from Sony claims that the Walkman will redefine its genre. Will it? The ergonomic design that they tout as being so novel is highly reminiscent of the stylish Rio Nitrus - now discontinued, it was withdrawn as a product in early 2005 and Rio (the manufacturer of the Nitrus) quit the market completely later that year. That's how old the 'revolutionary' ergonomic design is. Still pretty slick, but hardly redefines anything. As to calling their products a 'Must Have' for music lovers - please! Marketing departments can be a lot like Armies. They only know how to do one thing and sometimes they don't know when to stop, especially if they don't get told to stop. The information that has been released by Sony is so over-egged as to be almost unreadable. Enough negativityNice features: 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. NavigationSony 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 commentsOn 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. Bad NewsThe Sony Walkman NWA 1000, 1200 and 3000 series are geared-up for operating with the Sony music download service - Sony CONNECT. We have had some difficulty working with Sony software in the past with SonicStage. We also had some trouble using CONNECT this time around. In fact we got bored trying to use it and so just ended up working around it. Its crap. And annoying. And slooow. This may well be linked to Sony's recent stupidity but the CONNECT software didn't seem to do either what it was obviously supposed to do, or what we would like it to do. We cannot see how Sony will have any choice but to address this issue, particularly given their recent U-turn on being evil. If they are ever to build a reasonable revenue stream from the music they have on their books they will have to sort this software out. Money is a powerful argument for a company to fix a problem, so we cannot see this software being a problem for too long. Another piece of not-good consumer news is that Sony see nothing wrong with charging you 99p per track from their music stables. We take offense at iTunes' 79p, so 99p is taking the Mick. Fortunately you can still just use your own music for CDs, etc. so you don't have to pay their racketeering rates. CODECsAt the time of writing (Q4 05) only Sony's native ATRACs are supported for playback on this dukebox, but the unit will convert and play MP3 or WAVs on-the-fly (i.e. you can store MP3s and play them) and according to information we have heard the firmware will be updated to include support for WMAs convert-on-the-fly in Dec 05.
Battery NewsThis is one area where Sony really do kick-ass. The previous incarnation - the the Sony NWHD 5 had a battery life of 40 hours. This one has slightly less at 20, but still, 20 hours is fine. Unfortunately the battery is not removable, which means that replacing the battery is a chew. It's not locked into the chassis as with the various iPods, but its still not as easy as replacing the battery in your telly remote. ConclusionThis really is a sweet little player. It looks good. It feels good. It sounds good. There are some problems, but we expect most of those to be fixed relatively quickly (i.e. the software being crap and the lack of conversion for WMAs and Sony's recent flirtation with the Dark Side). On the whole: blinding. Choose from the below models to see what they look like in the flesh. Box Contents
6GB Models - no longer aviable8GB Models20GB Models |
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Next Generation Portable Music
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