Alright, I’m about to give up.
My girlfriend gave me a Sony NW-E505 Walkman and I was quite happy. It seems durable and robust, it charges in no time and best of all- it actually looks great. The style is quite different from iPods but I would say it definitely competes in the upper end of the design scale. In fact, I am quite happy with this piece of hardware if it wasn’t for one thing: the software. By software I mean both the firmware and the enclosed control software. SonicStage seems like a half-completed attempt at an iTunes competitor. Honestly I can’t say much about it because it made such bad first impressions on me that I uninstalled it after fifteen minutes or so. There is a small tool called MP3 File Manager as well which appeals to me much more because it is so simplistic. Only this tool is a little too simplistic - you can only create a folder by copying a folder with contents onto the walkman, and you cannot rename folders. Also, there is some problem with the firmware (I expect) that means that I have only been able to listen to about a third of the audiobooks and podcasts that I have put onto it. Whether it has to do with the encoding or maybe the length of the “track”, I don’t know. But even if working, listening to podcasts is way too complicated because I have to download and copy them manually.
So I am seriously considering buying an iPod Nano even though it annoys me because actually, the hardware part of the walkman is perfect for me. Do any of you have better experiences with this thing than I do? Is there some third party software that is compatible maybe?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.