Small, decent quality, NOT MP3!
Written: Jan 29 '02
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Pros: Great Audio quality, tiny size
Cons: Not MP3!!! Expensive cards, buggy software.
The Bottom Line: Waste of Money / Time trying to get it to work.
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| flindingo's Full Review: Sony Network Walkman NW-MS9 (64 MB) MP3 Player |
Well first of all I'll go through the nice benefits of this little player, then I'll get to the point of this not even being an MP3 player.
First of all it's tiny, this thing is less than 2 inches long and about 1/4 inch thick and 1 inch wide. The controls are a series of buttons located on the device, which actually are kind of hard to figure out, and shuffling around several songs is a bit of a pain in the butt. The LED display is great, it's a nice back-lit blue screen which lights up well, making it really easy to read in any lighting.
The quality of the audio is very good at it's top quality, it's the same as a Mini-disc player. (Not CD-Quality however). The battery life is superb, it's got a great rechargeable battery which lasts for hours on end (8+). Unfortunately it's a proprietary battery which makes it hard to use on long trips (12+ hour flights, with out an extra).
Now lets look at the problems, first the media it uses is Sony's Memory Stick, probably the most expensive Memory cards dollar for meg on the market. The controls on the unit are not clear, nor easy to juggle around on. And the main problem is that fact this device isn't MP3.
NOT MP3?!?!? Well that's the problem with this device, which tricks users into thinking it's MP3. Sony loves proprietary goods. This latest addition is just an expansion to a technology they invested a bunch on in the early 90's on a unit called MiniDisc. MiniDisc and Sony's NW-MS9 units use ATRAC3 a competitor to MP3, great quality comparable compression rates, but not widely adapted. This means you have to use Sony's special software OpenMG to drop songs to this device. Unlike other players in which you can rip and burn MP3's using tons of fast efficient software and dumping it to the card, this one requires a much slower encoder, and special software to catalog the songs.
The Software's interface is moderately confusing at best, you can convert Mp3's to the ATRAC3 format, or Wav's or rip CD's to the unit. Anyone you choose is much slower than a good MP3 unit. Once you're done you then have to create a playlist of your songs, and then transfer it to the unit. (You can't drag and drop like on a floppy/hard disk like some units, you need to use the software for the playlist, otherwise it won't play.) Oh yeah, if you have Windows XP, you'll need to upgrade which is about 50Megabytes, on a dial-up? Got 50 hours or so?....
Another problem with this device is the fact it's horribly expensive, one of the most expensive players on the market, which isn't even MP3.
Bottom Line... Waste of money, for $100 you can get a Rio ReVolt which plays CD's with Audio, MP3, or WMA (20+ hours of MP3, 15 hour battery life, read my review for more info.) This player is confusing, hard to use, but it has good quality (10 years old but good, and it's a good size.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 249
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Epinions.com ID:
flindingo
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Location: Atlanta, GA
Reviews written: 120
Trusted by: 35 members
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