Gadgets: Sony NWZ-A845 Walkman – Review

What a great MP3 player. For so many years Sony bestrode the portable audio world like a colossus, and it was a shock to witness how quickly the company fell behind when music became conveyed in bits and bytes instead of on tapes and discs.

Despite releasing a series of increasingly impressive gadgets, some of which were better than their corresponding iPods, Sony’s been scrambling to catch up ever since.
The 16GB NWZ-A845 may be the company’s best effort yet to regain that lost territory.

The slender player is stylish and elegant, though bigger than it looks in photos. It has a large 2.8-inch OLED screen and the controls are arrayed in a circular fashion that implies a scroll wheel but isn’t – yes, you actually have to press buttons. Oh, the hardship.

Its beauty is marred somewhat by product information embossed on the rear of the unit itself. That’s not unusual for Sony; the company often gives the impression its on the verge of Apple-like minimalism but then pulls away, as if it has developed cold feet at the last minute.

Even if you’re not that fussed about the way it looks, there’s plenty to recommend the A845.

The menu system, for example, is exemplary. There’s never any doubt about where you are or the function you’re selecting. And even if you’re confused, you just keep pressing the dedicated ‘back’ button until you stumble across something familiar.

There is a noise cancelling function built into the unit itself, rather than the supplied EX series headphones. It works very well and will be great on a plane flight or during a particularly vigorous vacuuming session, though we wouldn’t recommend switching it on while wandering the streets.

The Walkman doesn’t come with a disc of software, but nor do you have to download it. Instead the unit acts as its own storage, and you install the software to your PC directly from the player’s hard drive. It’s a clever touch and just on the right side of showing off.

You will note that we said you install software to your PC – that’s because the A845 is Windows only. But it’s not the whole story; we plugged the player into a Mac and it appeared as a removable drive.

Such interoperability is one of this player’s best features. It’s not recognised by iTunes, of course, so you can’t synchronise the Walkman directly, but we had no problems dragging and dropping files directly from Apple’s music management program. And as long as the file isn’t copy protected, the player automatically transcodes it to make it playable, if necessary. Sometimes it will be necessary because, oddly, the A845 doesn’t natively support WAV, FLAC or Ogg Vorbis files. Still, it’s a very nifty trick that’s rare in portable media players, and it works with video files, too.

You don’t even have to use Sony’s provided music program if you don’t want; the A845 is fully supported by Windows Media Player 11.

As ever with Sony’s MP3 players, battery life is excellent. The company claims up to 29 hours’ continuous music playback and nine hours for video, and while we didn’t get that (we were mostly listening to recordings ripped at bit rates higher than optimum for batteries, which drains power), we were none the less impressed.

One of the ways Sony achieves this is by limiting power-sucking features. The Walkman eschews many of the superfluous bells and whistles crammed into, for example, the iPod Nano – video recording, games and so on – and concentrates its efforts into being a streamlined, no nonsense music and video player.

That’s a mixed blessing, of course; some people like those extraneous features. The Nano is the A845′s natural competitor, and in many ways the Sony is the better product, certainly when comparing the basic functions. But at $399, the Walkman costs $81 more than the 16GB Nano. It’s hard to imagine that many people will favour the more expensive Sony on the basis that it doesn’t have a video camera, whether you need one or not.

RICHARD BETTS

Sony NWZ-A845 Walkman – Specifications

Display: 2.8-inch OLED, 400 x 240 pixels
Memory: 16GB
Supported File Formats: Audio – MP3, WMA, AAC-LC audio, Linear PCM; video – H.264, MPEG-4, WMV, AAC-LC video
Connections: USB
Battery: Lithium-ion rechargeable
Dimensions: 47.4 x 104.9 x 7.7mm
Weight: 62g

CONTACT

www.sony.co.nz

PROS

• Stylish
• Great menu
• Interoperable

CONS

• Expensive

VERDICT

A superb player, but it’s price will limit its appeal

This article is from Tone magazine issue 83. Click here to check it out.

To purchase Portable Music Players visit Harvey Norman.