BIOS: Technology Means Business

In our humble opinion, Sony is one of the best technology brands worldwide - not just in electronics, but also IT. The company’s history in IT may be relatively short, but the Japanese company has made great progress in all of its markets over the last couple of years. And if there’s one company who can topple Apple in terms of chic appeal and high street dominance, it’s definitely Sony.

Twenty-six years after the company’s Walkman brand created a revolutionary music lifestyle, the new Walkman is destined to redefine it. Simply called ‘Walkman’, the latest digital music player from Sony features a spectacular ergonomic design and an exciting range of intelligent features that allow you to enjoy music in a fun way. For instance, at the press of a button the ‘Artist Link’ function will search every artist, album and song stored on the device and offer suggestions of artists and bands closely linked to the genre of music being played at the time.

Available in two capacity sizes - 20GB (NW-A3000, £175) and 6GB (NW-A1000, £125), the player also features two new shuffle functions. By selecting ‘My Favorite Shuffle’, the player 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 which are currently held on the device.

Featuring an OLED display (2-inches on the 20GB version and 1.5-inches on the 6GB model), Sony’s 182g Walkman not only incorporates a range of great features, it also offers the ultimate in ease of use through an appealing user interface which - apart from being hidden under a layer of tinted translucent plastic - is both bright and clear. If that’s not enough, the non-removable rechargeable battery (power adapter supplied) lasts up to 20 hours.

Navigating and operating the Walkman is a snap thanks to the mobile phone style ‘Home’ menu, which offers nine different options that can be selected via the four-way directional button on the front of the device. These include ‘Music Library’, ‘Play Mode’, ‘Initial Search’, ‘Intelligent Shuffle’, ‘Favorite 100’, ‘Play History’, ‘Settings’, ‘Playlist’ and ‘Now Playing’.

Music can be searched in a variety of ways, via ‘Genre’, ‘Artist’, ‘Album’, ‘Song’, ‘Release Date’, ‘Rating’ and ‘Recently Transferred’, all of which can be scrolled through to enable you to find music quickly and easily. The player even records 3 years of playback history that can be searched and also features the first ever ‘Initial Search’ on a hard disk drive audio player, allowing you to scroll from A-Z.

Controls on the front of the player are kept to a minimum but make operating the player a breeze. There are simple navigation controls which allow you to skip through songs, change basic options and retreat through menus using the Back button. The Option button, unsurprisingly, takes you into the player’s main menu. On the right-hand side of the player, a silver slider increases and decreases volume, and on the left there’s a button to invoke ‘Artist Link'. The lower side of the player houses a proprietary USB cable connector and the top side includes a headphone socket and Hold button. The player can be charged either using the supplied AC adapter or USB cable.

The 20GB Walkman is available in either violet or silver, while the 6GB unit comes in the additional colours of pink and blue. All devices package with colour-matched headphones. The players also support a whole range of design-matching accessories such as a stylish remote control for easier navigation, various carrying cases, docking station for convenient connection with a PC as well as a docking speaker system giving the option to both connect to a PC as well as playing music through the speakers.

The player supports Sony’s ATRAC3plus (up to 256Kbit/s) as well as MP3 and DRM WMA (no WAV, Ogg or AAC support), but it can’t playback video on its display. It also ships with Sony’s latest ‘CONNECT Player’ software, which replaces SonicStage and offers relatively advanced music library management as well as providing access to the CONNECT catalogue of more than 1 million tracks and albums available for download. The only downside to the software is that it has to be used to transfer music to the player - it doesn’t support drag-and-drop transfers.

Sound quality from the Walkman was among the best we’ve heard on a portable digital audio player. An equaliser has also been incorporated, offering four preset modes including Heavy, Pop, Jazz and Unique, as well as two custom modes. When connecting the bundled set of earphones, we did notice some slightly annoying background hissing and the volume levels aren’t amongst the loudest on the market.

The equaliser also needed some adjustment to add some bass to the sound image - which otherwise proved well-rounded. Connecting a set of third-party earphones yielded quite an improvement in bass. Nevertheless this is one of the best HDD-based portable digital audio players on the market. [8]

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