5 Comments

1. G. Harper

   Posted on January 29, 2010 at 7:37 pm

   I bought the Walkman 16 Gig.
   
   First off I found this player to be Very easy to setup and use, infact it comes with no software CD to install, just plug it in via UBB and my computer sees it as portable hard drive, I can add/delete files that way, or use the pre-installed sowftware that comes with the mp3 (it will pop up once you connect via UBS) either way its easy and works great.
   
   Easy drag and drop. You can create Folders for certain bands and jsut play by folder (or artsist, album, playlist, ect).
   
   Mp3 play well and sound great, pics (.jpg and .bmp) look great and video (wmf) plays and looks very good.
   
   I find this mp3 player to be VERY easy to use, very reliable and all around awesome.
   
   I just wish it has 32 Gig or a SD slot to expand the memory, but it doesnt. Other than that, I love this player.
   
   Rating: 4 / 5
2. Funkmaster P

   Posted on January 29, 2010 at 4:37 pm

   This is only the second time I’ve left a review for a product in the 10 years or more that I’ve used Amazon. Normally products generally meet my expectations (whether good or bad), but this MP3 player was a real letdown. I use Amazon all of the time to check reviews on products before I purchase them. In fact, I like to literally research products to death. I was tied between this player and the 8 GB Zune, and eventually concluded that the most important aspect to me in an MP3 player is the amount of storage space. I’m a simple music lover that just wants a player that sounds good and can house my very large collection of CD’s. This thing had double the space for the same price.

   The first small letdown I had when I started the player was how barebones the software was. The only other MP3 player I’ve ever owned is a 30 GB Dell DJ that definitely served its time well, and I feel even the Dell had better options. Scrolling through a long list of artists or songs is very tedious. You need to hold the down arrow while it scrolls. There’s also no way – at least that I was aware of – to skip to a certain letter of the alphabet, only a set of letters in the alphabet. This means that if the artist you want starts with an ‘S’ but the set is ‘P-T’ then you need to skip to ‘P’ and then scroll from there. This can be time consuming when you have a lot of artists. The more artists or tracks you add the narrower the sets get I believe, but it didn’t work well enough for me.

   You also cannot make playlists on the device. This means that you can’t queue a track to play after the current one. You either listen on shuffle or straight through. You can create playlists externally and drop them on the player but that seems kind of pointless. The player also had a slight lag when navigating menus. I think this must be typical of Sony devices because my Sony Ericsson phone is the exact same way. These things however were not enough for me to feel completely letdown. I feel these fall in the “it’s somewhat I expected” range. I could live with these.

   What I could not live with is what happened after that. I used drag-and-drop to put tracks on my player like a USB flash drive. This worked for the first 3 GB and then things got screwy. I tried to put the rest of my collection on the player and although it looked like the transfer was successful, the tracks or artists did not show up on my player. They were common MP3 files like the first tracks I added and should have had no problem playing on the device.

   From there I went to Sony’s support page and talked to about 5 different people through online chat. By the way, this is a very annoying experience because the “analysts” you speak with use the same pre-written phrases constantly. Sometimes I was not sure if I was speaking with a robot. Needless to say, by the end of their attempt to troubleshoot my player could no longer connect to my computer. My player would not reset or reformat, and the player would lose and regain connection to my computer every other second it was plugged in. It was after 2 hours of frustrating conversation that it was deemed physically defective and would need to be sent in for either repairs or an exchange. I’ve decided it’s not worth the repair or exchange on a player that lasted me less than a month. I’m going to take it back and get a refund.

   I gave this player 2 stars because maybe this is an isolated incident. Sony does have some quality products, and there still is a chance that I just got really unlucky with my player. That being said though, I’ve never had something break so easily with such little wear. The player was nothing special to begin with besides cheap space so to me it’s not worth any future investment. I’ll probably look at another brand and settle for less storage capacity.
   Rating: 2 / 5
3. Joseph E. Venini

   Posted on January 29, 2010 at 2:52 pm

   I have always loved Sony products because of their price/quality vs. Ipod products, but I have been unable to find acessories (ie skins or bands) for this particular Series/model.
   Rating: 4 / 5
4. My Pen Name

   Posted on January 29, 2010 at 12:40 pm

   Got this player about a month ago, and while it seems very solidly put together, it doesn’t seem like much thought was put into the “software” that runs on the player. Examples:
   
   – fast forward and fast rewind feature is pathetic; holding down the button for a longer time doesn’t increase the speed of the ff/fr search, it just continues to search at the same slow speed. Pathetically slow, for any track longer than a minute or two. < >
   
   – When you’re listening to a track, total track length isn’t displayed, nor is a countdown to the end of the track. All that is shown is how much time has already passed on the track.
   
   – And I’ll echo another reviewer’s gripe about not being able to create playlists on the fly.
   
   Ridiculous shortcomings, in my opinion. No excuse for any of them.

   On the plus side, I have to say that I like the option of searching through music as it’s organized in folders on the device, rather than having to use the tag structure. It’s nice to have both options available, which, as far as I know, is not an option on ipods.

   I’d give this 4 or 5 stars if I had any confidence that Sony would issue a firmware update addressing the shortcomings described above, and others listed in other people’s comments. It’s well-priced, feels solid, looks flashy. But internal design is poor…
   Rating: 3 / 5
5. Louis Duval

   Posted on January 29, 2010 at 12:26 pm

   the last thing to buy is SONY MP3 any model.

   First they are linked to WINDOWS MEDIA, so if for any reason you’re with another player, the software don’t recognize it, unless, you’re configurate your entire system.
   
   If you want to download MP3’s from a DVD or a CD of your personnal collection, if WINDOWS didnééééééé,t get it properly, SONY wouldn’t accept it, compare to some other reader where they are looking for compatibility before saying NO!

   So please,think twice before doing it so.
   Rating: 1 / 5