Customer Reviews

Sony NW-E105PS Network Walkman 512 MB Digital Music Player (White)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Sony calls this new line of flash-based, coin-like (but they are thick coins!) MP3/ATRACT players the Psycs, and their new-age styling does psyc you out. Which is not a bad thing, as they are more euro-cool than the rather bland and boring iPod and the downright butt-ugly iRiver. The more I look at the Psyc, the more I like its looks.

The new Psyc MP3 player features 512MB of flash memory, which is great for those of you jogger jocks out there. You can shake this thing violently and it won't skip a beat, unlike those hard drive-based players. Before you insert an AAA battery, the Psyc weighs in at an amazingly light 0.9 oz. -- that's right, folks, it's less than an ounce! With the AAA battery, my guess is it's about 2 oz. It's very small although, relatively speaking, it looks a little thick. (About 0.75 in. at its thickest part.)

What, you ask, it uses an AAA battery? Yes my friend, and this one AAA alkaline battery can power the player up to 70 hours! That's almost three full days of continuous playing. The phrase "up to" here means that in order to get all 70 hours of playing, you must 1) play ATRAC3Plus songs encoded at 48kbps and 2) do not press buttons or do random play (i.e., just leave the player playing sequentially). In the real life we like to skip a song, fast forward, random play (a.k.a. shuffle play), turn it on and off and on and off, and most importantly, we play MP3 songs. All these operations reduce the battery life. Given my experience with previous Sony MP3 players, my estimate is one good AAA battery should last you 40 hours or more. (With my beloved Sony NW-HD3, I routinely get the advertised battery life of 30 hours even when playing MP3 files.)

Of course, the use of AAA means you get an abundant and ready supply of cheap power source, and you can trek in the Amazon for weeks on end without having to worry about finding an AC outlet.

The Psyc, which comes in three colors (green and blue for the 512MB version, and orange for the 256MB version), has a nice backlit LCD screen, so you always know what you are playing as opposed to having to guess as on some other certain MP3 player. It plays MP3 as well as Sony's ATRAC songs. If you are an ATRAC fan you'll like the sound quality of this little player; it's at least as good as Sony's MD players. For MP3's, the sound quality is a bit "muffled" compared to my NW-HD3 20GB player, but still quite good if you pair it with a good pair of headphones (i.e., ditch the stock earphones).

Sony still has a long, long way to go in the user interface department, as this has always been its weakness, whether it's digital music or digital video or anything else. The Psyc is not hard to use; its basic functions are no-brainers. But, for anything beyond play/pause/skip, its interface, whether on the unit itself or on the PC transfer side, is still not polished and was clearly designed for a Japanese audience -- Japanese consumers reportedly love to play with complicated gadgets; no surprise given how elaborate sushi-making and origami are. We American consumers like things that are elegant and simple, and Sony has a lot of room for improvement in this regard.

In short, I don't think you'll be disappointed in the new Psyc flash-based MP3 players. They are stylish and lightweight and lasts forever on cheap AAA batteries. They have good sound quality and are priced right. Just be prepared to spend some time with the manual and experimenting a little. If you are stuck, you are welcome to e-mail me at gadgester @t hotmail with your questions.

I wanted to buy a small, flash-based music player primarily for jogging and taking to the gym, so naturally I compared the 2 premier products out right now, Sony PSYC vs. Ipod Shuffle. The PSYC comes out on top in SO many ways.

1) LCD screen a huge plus for navigating through albums and artists. Shuffle has no screen.
2) Tremendous amount of features for such a little player, such as shuffle, repeat, browse by artist or browse by song, sound equalizer...all intuitive to use. By contrast, the Shuffle practically forces you to play your songs on random. Looking for that favorite album? Good luck finding it with the shuffle.
3) ATRAC3Plus coding allows you to store MANY more songs in 512 MB compared to Apple's AAC. 64 kbs in ATRAC3Plus provides excellent sound quality, even through stock ear phones.
4) 1 AAA battery = 70 hours! That means no need to constantly have to plug the blasted Shuffle into your computer to recharge everyday.

Sony has made an excellent product here, not to mention one that is very asthetically pleasing. You want substance AND style, get the PSYC.

How much you like Sony's new flash-memory Network Walkmans is going to depend on what you use them for. I use mine to load seven or eight CDs onto for jogging, walking, and for my car. If you have a large collection of MP3s and other formats you want to load on and off of it, you might find another player that suits your needs.

Ripping CDs to Sony's ATRAC3 format at fairly low bit-rates sounds pretty darn good for such a small player, not to mention that ATRAC is a gapless format, which is excellent for dj-mix CDs, live albums, and so on. MP3s, however, occasionally crop up with some weird digital artifacts that I've noticed. It doesn't ruin them by any means, it's just up to you as to how good you want your MP3s to sound. Like other reviewers have said, though, the sound (regardless of format) is a little muffled. However, Sony was smart enough to allow users to adjust bass and treble levels on the unit (and save two seperate presets!). Cranking the treble to max remedies the muffled sound to a large degree, creating a very bright sound, if not exactly a colorful one.

Besides saving your own sound adjustments, the unit also lets you browse tracks on the player by "groups" (albums, playlists, etc.), which is very handy. Playback features are numerous, and let you shuffle songs by group, or every song, plus a variety of repeat options. The display is even customizable. One minor issue is the tricky hold/group slider and the sunken menu buttons on the back, but for a player this size there's probably not too much they could do. The rocking-faceplate buttons, hoever, are a neat trick. As for Sony's SonicStage software, at least it's semi-intuitive; I've seen a lot worse (ahem, Rio).

My 20GB Karma ruined me for features a lot of other hard drive (let alone flash) players didn't give you. Surprisingly, my little Network Walkman can keep up, with gapless playback, customizable sound, and excellent battery life, not to mention how cool it looks. Any one who is looking for a fun, inexpensive way to carry around some of their favorite tracks would do well to pick one of these guys up.

After looking at Ipod shuffle, I opted for the PSYC at a few bucks less. It holds more songs if you use Sony's ATRAC system and has more navigation options than the Ipod. The sound quality is great even on the supplied earbuds. The software is easy to use, though the translations from Japanese can be strange in the instruction manuals. It runs on a single AAA battery for lots of hours, no worry about recharging. It also looks a lot neater than Ipod and not everyone is carring one, yet. Great LCD display. All in all a good buy.

I have had my mp3 player for a couple of weeks. I love it! It was so easy to load my CD's onto it and so easy to use while jogging. I reccommend it.

this is my first mp3 player and i just chose it after a good research over net and considering my budget.at first wanted to buy an iPod but considering the fact that,going to buy a PMP in near future,decided to go with flash-based players and also lower the price as much as i can my choices now become:creative zen n200-Shuffle-NWe100 series.considering shuffles lack of features my main choice became N200 because of low price and featured-pack package,but when i saw all those awfull ratings reviewers gave it and seeing it at store i went with my last choie:NW-E103 cause it has the nearest price to N200 and never go back.
and now my expressions:
after i got it,i must say it is very beautiful and stylish(i picked the one with Orange color)to hide in your pocket!and also very small.sound quality is extreme as expected from sony products dont let other reviewers confuse you,it IS excellent.
and for the software side you can either Drag&Drop by updating mp3 file manager to v.2.o or using sonicstage 3.0-i must say after reading all those reviews which say it is a crap i found it very useful and also beautiful UI you can with a little effort import all your library and(you must rearrenge it) and then transfer them.you can also convert your songs to atrack3/plus and reduce their size so that you can double or triple your players space,wich i find very nice and useful,you can play with the settings and choose the bitrate that best suits you-in most cases you cant tell the diffrence after compression.
the unit itself is well-built and can last a long time.face plate buttons are very intuitive and nice my only compliant is the usb cover and Hold switch wich are not that easy to operate and wish it had 512mb or 1gb thats why i gave it 4 stars.
over all very happy to buy it and recommend it.

Yes, it's small, yes the battery life is excellent and I have to admit that the sound is not bad. That's where it stops with this product. One of the tricky things is when you have to slide the side button in the particular play mode of your choice. The slider button is extremely difficult to adjust.
Here's the worst of this product: the accompanying Sonic Music Stage, which is the proprietary program from which to buy and download songs. The program is ATROCIOUS. It's search engine is primitive; for instance: if you want to search for a certain artist, it will come up with a list of songs that may have the closest term to the name, no artist however. So the only way to go is by song title.
It doesn't end there: EVERY time I have bought music in the past year I had to wrestle with their internal downloading system. It SAYS it is downloading to your hard drive, but it is only 'pretending' while you sit and wait for hours. When you go to the help site to find out why it was not downloading properly, it kicked me off and I had to log in again, However, the newly bought songs had dissapeared and I had no clue where to look for them, so I had to go to their history site and sift through all the songs I had bought in the past year. Problem: because there was no date of when any of these were downloaded.
The program also AUTOMATICALLY groups your downloaded songs without any rhyme or reason, instead of filing them as singles and letting the user decide what to group.
Don't buy this product unless you want to load up on frustration instead of downloading music, no matter how computer savy you are.
My next MP3 will be a nano ipod, and definitely NOT a Sony product.

Got mine (blue version of this) from Sonystyle.com just yesterday. After playing with it for a few hrs here are my impressions.

First and foremost the mp3 playback quality is atrocious. 128kbps files sound like 64kbps or lower. Even my no-brand-name cheap mp3/cd player has better mp3 quality.

I suspect the codec/DSP in the Sony are still designed for their propreitary ATRAC3 plus format with a secondary mp3 support. In fact converting a mp3 file to Atrac3plus (with included software) sounded better than just mp3 file. Inspite of this hassle, it was still below mp3 quality from other players.

The battery life seems to be in line with the specs listed by Sony. No complaints on that front. The backlight LCD display is a nice bonus too. The size/volume is significantly more than the iPod Shuffle.

The user interface is more loaded than such a small palyer can withstand. As a result it more cumbersome and confusing than Apple/iRiver players.

In short this awkwardly named "mp3" music player is a step in right direction for Sony but is still below average. Price is right but not the quality.

Why settle for less, when you can get a brand new original iPod nano 4GB for Free! I got mine from this web site: ilikethis.info/ipod-nano