Customer Reviews

Sony NW-E107 Network Walkman 1 GB Digital Music Player (Silver)

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

There's a few things too look for in a flash player.
Long Battery Life. Check.
LCD Screen with International Language Support. Check
Good Navigation. Ah, good enough.
Price. Check

Easy to put songs in. This is the major one.

Here comes the doozy.
YOU can only use SonicStage Software to put files into this 'chine. No drag and drop. No drag and drop. What happens if you want to port stuff over to say a school computer? Nope. Say you want to port stuff over to friends place. Nope. Say you want to port stuff from your friend to your place. Nope.

That really sucks. Flash is more expensive than Hard Drive MP3s. If you cant use it as storage as well as listening to music then it's not worth that extra cash wedge, battery life or no battery life.

It's true that you need to use SonicStage in order to be able to PLAY songs on this player. However, when you attach the NW-E107 to the USB cable, it is recognized as a USB drive. You can, in fact, drag and drop files onto it, as well as off of it.

Got mine (512MB, 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. However 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.

My iRiver IFP-195 finally packed up the other day so I began looking around for a suitable replacement. iPods have never appealed to me due to battery issues and sound quality and iRiver's latest products do not support Windows 98 so I decided to check out Sony's latest offerings. That's when I came across this wonderful little player.

I don't download music, I just convert my own CDs so I wasn't concerned about any alleged MP3 issues (although it obviously does play them). I had previously converted my CDs to WMA for the iRiver and so once I got this home I converted some of my favourite albums to ATRAC3 (132kbps) to see if they sounded as good. Not only did they sound better, especially the bass, but unlike MP3 and WMA on the iRiver there were no added gaps between tracks. This meant that I could finally listen to albums like Oxygene and Equinoxe without the annoying split-second gaps between the tracks on the CD. It was worth it for that alone.

As for SonicStage, I don't understand why people have a problem with it. You put a CD in, convert the tracks to ATRAC3 (or ATRAC3Plus), plug the player in and copy the tracks across. Once on the player you can move the albums around. It's not rocket science and I actually found it to be better than iRiver's Music Manager.

In summary, I think this is a wonderful player which far exceeded my expectations.

First of all, I got to say that I has a iPod Shuffle 1G, and the change to the new Sony Sony NW-E107 Network Walkman 1 GB was awesome. This unit has a great sound quality, you can control the bass and treble levels. The earbuds are pretty good, sounds great.

The buttons and display are fine. The LCD display it's no that clear and the buttons are quite complicated to command, you need to take the hole unit in your hand to control the player.

The battery, the best. You can have up to 70 hours of continuous playing with only one AAA battery. And if you go for a long trip or something, you would get there with batteries, and if not, you can replace it. Great.

The software. The bad part of the movie. I thought that iTunes was lame, but the Sony's SonicStage it's even worst. Quite complited, not friendly, not good.

The other ugly part of the unit it's the transfer speed from the computer. With USB 2.0 you can transfer below 1Mb/s.

I think that the bad parts can't compare with the great ones. Sounds great, superior battery life, good earbuds and good looking.

I bought this mp3 player because
1) It's a Sony
2) It has at least 1gb of storage

I'm returning this mp3 player because
1) No belt clip or arm band
2) Battery cover does not stay on
3) Froze the first day I used it
4) Does not have 1gb storage, more like 700mb, that's a C-
5) No way to navigate through playlist except skipping track by track

I'll make this quick:

It's tiny.
It's solid.
IT SOUNDS AWESOME!


PS ...I'm not sure why there's so much griping about the software. It does exactly what it's supposed to do and does it well. It's obvious some of these reviewers have not used any other music related software ...because they are all cumbersome and a little bulky. Sony's is no better NOR worse than any of the others I've used, and I've used quite a few.

This new line of flash-based, coin-like (but they are thick coins, esp. in the waist!) MP3/ATRACT players from Sony are the latest models of their Psyc line of digital music players. The new-age styling of these MP3 players 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 silver Psyc MP3 player features 1GB 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 -- esp. in the middle area where the single AAA battery resides. (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 also comes in three other colors (green and blue for the 512MB version, and orange for the 256MB version). It has a nice, sharp 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 with transfering music. If you are stuck, you are welcome to e-mail me at gadgester @t hotmail with your questions.

Recommended.

"Flawed Fatally" and "SonicStage Suicide" are pretty much right on in their appraisals.

The hardware is awesome. I don't regret getting this gem. I just squeezed 20 albums on this puppy with roughly 250+ songs.
And the battery life is spectacular - Sony must employ some of the best power management experts on the planet.

However, and this is the big frustrator, the Sonic software IS the worst piece of crap I've ever used, going back to the DOS days of the '80s. It's horrendously slow (almost like watching the grass grow), weirdly inaccurate (in it's gauges showing transfers), unintuitive, and basically a scam (my opinion) to get you out to their website to sell you more music.

BTW, since the instruction manual says you can't drag-and-drop MP3s and have them play, and since I tried this and it in fact doesn't work just as the folks at Sony truthfully say, don't believe that you can despite what other reviewers here say. What you can do is drag-and-drop files, so you could use this as a portable memory stick, but they really don't play... at least I haven't been able to get them to play.

In summary, however bad the software is, the hardware is still amazing and I hope that I won't have to interact with the software too often. I even went out and downloaded the latest software from the 'net, so don't think this is just an outdated review and new software might be available. I suggest to Sony that they skip from version 3.2 straight to 5.0, fire all the developers of the present software and go get a team who can whip off something worthwhile. And, develop drag-and-drop for MP3s.

This mp3 player is great! It's small, has a long battery life, and it can hold a ton of songs. Also, it has two modes so you can skip easily from playlist to playlist or just look through the songs from one playlist. I recommend getting the armband that goes with it. It makes working out very enjoyable and it doesn't get in the way. Overall, a great product.