tgregoryt's Full Review: Sony Network Walkman NW-E107 (1 GB) MP3 Player
I believe I am going to stop buying Sony products, and the main reason is this “Sony Walkman Circ MP3 Player NW-E107. I will grant you that the player has great features which I will expand upon later. Other players, however, have similar features but don't have such awful software.
Sony’s main weakness in this unit is that it is not compatible with anything except itself. By this I mean that you cannot directly load music into the player using drop and drag or any other Window’s technology. Because the unit is not compatible with most types of music, I can give the unit only 2 stars – one star for good features, but minus three stars since it only works with the included – non-Macintosh compatible – software.
The product comes with a CD-ROM containing a program with which you can organize your MP3s. Using this program – and only this program – you can change your MP3s/CDs into Sony’s Atrac format. Then you download these Atrac songs (again using the software) onto your player. This whole process takes a while. A long while. Like two hours to download 500 megabytes.
On top of that this is not a plug and play unit. It is not exactly the type of thing that my computer-illiterate parents can use. First you have to install the software, and for those of you that like Apples, the software is not compatible with Macintoshes. And even after you install the software, it sends you to Sony’s online store when you start the program and then you have to figure out how to get music off of your computer or your CD collection without buying anything else from Sony.
Once the software has been loaded, you organize all of your songs which were already organized. Unfortunately the software will separate the songs by artist regardless of where they were in your organization files. So after you have spent several hours reorganizing your songs, you again have to wait while all of these songs finally enter your machine (for me 500 megabytes of songs took about 2 hours to load with a Pentium 4).
After the songs are finally loaded on the player, I will grant, the unit works great. The songs are arranged in the order in which they were arranged by the software, which is a nice feature. And it is relatively easy to repeat songs within one folder if this is your desire – for instance if you have music and language programs loaded at the same time, and just want to listen to music, or language, over and over again, it is relatively easy to do. The unit also has a graphic equalizer in the event you want more treble or base. Further the unit is very light and small (around 3 ounces with a two-inch diameter) and the battery lasts a long time. But these are features that other MP3 players have.
To me the lack of compatibility with MP3s or any other format besides the Sony-exclusive Atrac is insanely annoying. If for whatever reason I lose the software, I cannot use the player. If I eventually run into the inevitable space problem on my hardrive, I cannot use the player. And worse, downloading songs from any site will have to be translated by the software, which again takes time.
The lack of compatibility with most current hardware and software, as well as the time-consuming nature of the provided software, make this unit exceedingly annoying to use. For this reason I give the unit 2 stars. One star for standard quality, but minus 3 (at least) for being so annoying.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 99 Recommended for: Athletes - Lightweight and Portable, Perfect for the Gym
Small, round multiformat digital audio player weighs under 1 ounce 1 GB built-in flash memory stores up to 680 songs Plays MP3, ATRAC, and ATRAC3 form...More at Amazon Marketplace
Digital Media Player With 1gb Hard Drive Capacity. Compatible With Sony Connect. Features: Equalizers, Anti-skip, Simple Navigation, Lightweight, Comp...More at Target
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.