Sony NW-E505 Network Walkman 512 MB Digital Music Player with FM Tuner Blue
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List Price: $129.99
Features
• Built in FM Tuner
• A three minute charge will provide up to three hours of playback
• One Handed Jog DialOperation
• Up to 50 Hours of Playback Life with Rechargeable Embedded Battery
• Plays back ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus format and MP3 files, and supports WMA and WAV |
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Sony NW-E505 Network Walkman 512 MB Digital Music Player with FM Tuner Blue Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Nice Hardware, Horrible Software and Support
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First, the pluses: The simple elegance of this player, combined with amazing battery life, provide a product that's easy to use and nice looking.
The downside? Getting to that point where you can enjoy listening to music on this slick little player requires jumping through a bunch of intrusive DRM hoops that make you feel like you're in an accelerated course for a computer science degree.
See, Sony makes some great hardware, but they can't program their way out of a soggy paper bag. At the same time, their zeal for depriving citizens of their fair-use rights is unmatched. Put these two factors together, and you have SonicStage and the OpenMG format. "OMG" is right! I haven't seen anything this appalling since Sony started hacking its customers' PCs with rootkits.
The player can only play the OpenMG format, and all of your WMA and MP3s have to be converted (very slowly) before loading them. It never occurred to the SonicStage programmers that you might have multiple cores or processors, so don't expect them to help speed this process.
There's some crazy "authorization" process you need to do, providing some amount of private information to Sony, before they'll allow you to transfer your music, which you bought and paid for, to your player, also bought and paid for. Unfortunately, all I ever got from when attempting to "authorize" were error messages.
Luckily, they do have a really rudimentary piece of software, "MP3 Manager" that converts and transfers MP3s to unauthorized players. Imagine that, a simple little program to do the dirt-simple task of loading your player! It doesn't install a rootkit, take over every file association on your machine, or sell you Ricky Martin tracks. I highly recommend downloading this from the Sony support website and using it exclusively. Oh, it ain't pretty; it's still Sony software, but somehow it manages to get the job done.
If you do buy this player, I don't recommend trying to upgrade the firmware. When I did, Sony's firmware updater destroyed the player. After an inordinate amount of waiting and bickering with a few different Sony support agents, they did graciously condescend to replace my player with a refurbished unit for the low, low, price of $14.50
In the process of trying to get support, I tried to send email through their support website, but encountered a bug in the form submission! How's that for irony? Then after getting phone support, they sent a survey to me to rate their performance. Again, I couldn't submit that due to a bug. Nice work guys!
So, overall, if you can get past the hurdles put in your way by Sony's paranoid delusional programmers, it's a nice little player. Just be prepared for a headache. |
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Sony NW-E505 Network Walkman 512 MB Digital Music Player with FM Tuner Blue ultimate electronics.