Sony Walkman NWZE345BLK 16 GB Video MP3 Player (Black)

by Sony

Product Details

• Item Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B002IPH9ZO
• Item model number: NWZE345BLK
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,520 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Enjoy hours of continuous music and video wherever you go with Sony's slim E340 Series. Enjoy a 2-inch QVGA screen, wide format support, an FM radio, and Sony's time-proven audio technologies in a slim, easy-to-use media player.

Enjoy hours of continuous music and video wherever you go. Click to enlarge.

Headphones and Mini USB cable included. Click to enlarge.

Available in black and red. Click to enlarge.

Key Features

• Long battery life
• User-friendly interface for easy operation
• 2-inch QVGA (320x240) high-brightness, color LCD
• Easy drag-and-drop file transfer functionality
• Compact and slim design
• Supports multiple audio codecs and video formats
• Clear Stereo and Clear Bass Audio Technologies
• Built-in FM radio tuner
• Headphones and Mini USB cable included
• Available in black and red

Key Technologies

Battery
The long-lasting battery lets you listen to up to 30 hours of music and watch up to 4 hours of video without needing to recharge.

Easy Navigation
The E340's user-friendly interface makes navigating through your music, pictures, and videos an easy task.

LCD
A 2-inch QVGA (320x240) high-brightness screen, color LCD provides you with a rich viewing experience on your video MP3 player.

Drag-n-Drop
Easily manage your music, pictures, and video files via drag-n-drop on your PC.

Design
On-the-go video and music is easy thanks to the slim, compact design.

Formats
The E340 supports multiple high-quality video formats (AVC (H.264/AVC), MPEG-4, and WMV), as well as a variety of audio codecs (MP3, WMA, AAC-LC [.mp4], and L-PCM [.wav]), giving you more freedom to download the kind of music and video that you want.

Sound
Clear Stereo and Clear Bass Audio Technologies for clearer, deeper sound without distortion.

FM Tuner
A built-in FM tuner enables you to listen to FM radio stations directly from your MP3.

What's in the Box
Sony WALKMAN E-340 Series 16 GB Digital Music Player (Black), Headphones, USB cable, User's Manual

Product Description

Enjoy your favorite music and videos wherever you go with the full-featured 1Walkman NWZ-E345 16GB Flash Portable Media Player. Boasting long lasting battery life, the slim and compact E340 Walkman player delivers up to 30 hours of music or up to 4 hours of video playback on a single charge.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

252 of 261 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, decent value, but a few flaws, November 22, 2009

By 

K. Swanson (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sony Walkman NWZE345BLK 16 GB Video MP3 Player (Black) (Electronics)

[Edit: Upgrade from 3.5 to 4.4 stars; see below]

After my poor experience with the Phillips GoGear mp3 player (reviewed here last week), I thought I'd see what Sony can do with an mp3 player.

I bought their first (excellent) FM walkman in 1980 but haven't used one of their portables since. I am in general a Sony fan, and my 1986 Trinitron is still running like new. Gotta love that kind of quality! But do they still have it?

First, the good:

-Excellent battery life: 30 hours for music, and it does get close to that if you don't do much scrolling. Nice.

-Lots of gigs for a c-note: about 6 bucks per gig, once you realize that it's only 14.4 gb. I hate the way companies do that, btw. Don't tell me I'm getting 16 gigs and then give me ten percent less. Be honest! Stuff like that loses customers, savvy ones at least. {Edit: 9/16/11. For whatever reason, this now costs 50% more, so it's now exactly 10 per gig...no real bargain at the price.)

-Good sound...but with that traditional Sony eq curve: very flat. I've had a few Sony receivers and cd players and tape decks over the years, and they are all very flat across the ranges. This makes for nice tight bass and decent mids, but the top end is always a little compressed and lacks shimmer and overtones. Still, a solid tone, not tinny.
And seeing as most users choose mp3 files at either 128kbps or 192kbps (I'd recommend the latter if you play this through a car or other decent full-range stereo), there's plenty of compression already, so no huge loss. Using 320kbps or wav files, which this unit does support, will result however in some noticeable loss of shimmer and breathing room for the high frequencies.

-You can use folders, saves a lot of scrolling time. Put jazz, metal, etc into their own folders. Any smart mp3 player does this.

-***Please note!***Nice, simple drag and drop of files right out of the box, with no need to install the software. Just plug the Walkman into your usb and wait for it to show up on your computer as "Walkman". Do a few clicks and you're in the "music" folder; now drag and drop your files, all at once or one at a time. Presto! That's sweetness, because almost every problem I've had with mp3 players stems from badly written software, and avoiding the need for it altogether is preferable. If you can avoid installing your included software for any player, do it; it only causes hassles in the long run unless you need a certain feature. Drag and drop is where it's at: quick, simple, efficient. And no adware etc installed surreptitiously by the software cd, a newly common scam.
PS I prefer to make the folders first as opposed to using the WMP sync feature; it has glitches, while simple folder drag and drop never has for me.

-Gets good and loud. Helps with certain headphones. Sounds good on my Koss PortaPros and great on my AKG K701s. The phones that come with this are cheese, as usual. Buds will never compare to real cans.

-Excellent for running, my main use for mp3 players. It hasn't skipped on me once and can take all sorts of shaking and bouncing. Very nice.

-Very thin, light, sleek. Takes up almost no space in any pocket, purse, etc.

-A strange design touch that I haven't seen anyone mention, but which struck me right off: the control buttons on the front panel are shaped almost precisely like Mickey Mouse's head! This can't be coincidence; surely someone in design did this on purpose. So is Sony in bed with the Mouse, or what's up? In any case, sometimes I see it and hear Mickey's estrogenic squeal in my inner ear saying, "Pluto! Punch me in the nose and let's get this party started!"

-Along with the essential external volume buttons, there's a manual lock switch on the side of the unit. Very useful to not have to scroll to make this go on and off. A good design feature that all mp3 players should have. You might want to use this when it's off and in your pocket, as the unit turns on with only minor presssure on the front panel button...but that leads to:

-Another major plus, this unit starts playing exactly where the last tune you were playing stopped, in about a half second after the button is touched. Some players take ten seconds. This baby rips right into the music in a flash (literally; flash drive players have so many advantages). Excellent.

But, the bad:

-the screen is waaay thin; it's already covered with scratches after only a few days in my empty pocket. Not good. I don't care about the aesthetics, but do need to see the screen!

-to ff or rewind quickly, you must first pause the track: took me a while to figure this out. Not a big con, but could have been been done without needing to pause.

-There's a bar showing how long the tune is but no way to see time remaining, a very useful bit of data. Until a minute or so is gone, it's hard to estimate song length via the bar, and one must hit the option button (Mickey's right ear) and then scroll down to "detailed information" to get the exact song length; too much hassle for a feature that's standard on most mp3 players. Not a big issue, but an oversight worth correcting.

-and the one thing that will make me return this item next week: you can't delete songs or files from the player. You must first hook it up to a computer! Terrible design. My years-old Muvo deletes on the fly, as do my Dell DJ and other players. This is a huge mistake: with 4,000 songs, how can I remember all the ones I need to dump? Very major flaw, and a deal breaker for me.

But, for those who only transfer stuff they already know and love, this is a pretty darn decent player. I don't know who wants to watch movies or vids on a thumbnail-sized screen, but as a music player, this offers good sound and plenty of storage for a good price.

At this rate we'll get a terabyte for a c-note within a couple years.
Can't wait! Then we can put everything on in lossless FLAC files, the only real way to go. MP3 is okay, but still a compromise.

Hey Sony: not bad...but how can you leave out such a huge feature as deleting on the fly?

[Edit: 12/30/09. I now have to give this little thang a little more than four stars...and hooray to Amazoon's code writers: we can now finally change our ratings after the original review. I returned my original to the mallwart (so nice of them to let us try stuff out! And so unfortunate they can't pay living wages so I might feel bad about costing them restocking fees...), but after looking around for a few weeks I realized this Sony unit offers far more bang for the buck than any other mp3 player out there. So I picked one up here, saving twenty over the mallwart price, and am very happy with it, barring the above caveats.

The best way to deal with no delete feature seems to be to mark the tracks you don't dig with the "wishlist" feature on the options screen, and then when you charge the unit you can open the files and delete tunes you've wishlisted. Much more hassle than deleting on the fly, but at least a workable solution to my main negative about the product.

If Sony releases a firmware update that lets us delete on the fly (not sure if that's possible or not; hope so), then I'd have to give this thing an almost perfect rating.

Pair it with Koss Portapros and you will be blown away by the sound.]

[Edit: 5/12/10. Still working fine after plenty of use while running, hiking, and hooked up to the car stereo. Zero complaints.

And here's a tip I learned from a battery expert: these lithium units apparently prefer to be full all the time, and seeing as they don't have "memory effect" like normal batteries, it's safe to recharge this unit as often as you like, with no resultant loss of memory over the long haul. But supposedly lithiums also work best and last longest if one lets them drain completely once every 30 recharges or so, and then fully fills them up again. I don't know enough about batteries to confirm or deny (though I've been doing it that way and my walkman is still running a long time before needing juice), but it was a very detailed, well-written discussion by someone with a lot of experience in the field, who wasn't selling anything, and that's the kind of opinion I tend to trust. Just FYI.]

[Edit: 1/12/11. Seeing as this review is being read a lot, thought I'd mention battery life stats after 14 months' steady usage, about a thousand hours or so. I fully charged it and left it running on shuffle last week to see how the batt's doing, and it gave me 12 hours straight. Not bad at all considering most players don't give a dozen hours out of the box. When I scroll etc in between albums, I get about ten hours now, still very satisfactory.

And I guess I got lucky, because my Walkman has yet to break down in any way. The occasional freeze is instantly fixed by turning it off and then on again.

All in all, it's given me excellent value and I'm glad this review has helped so many people get more music into their lives.]

75 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great sound marred by bad install software, February 5, 2010

By 

John Bartas (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sony Walkman NWZE345BLK 16 GB Video MP3 Player (Black) (Electronics)

I almost hate to give this thing only three stars because it has great
sound and hardware features. One the other hand the Sony Windows installer is so bad
it deserves negative stars. But there is a workaround - just use simple drag and drop,
and don't even run the Sony install or media software on your windows machines.

Since Sony's famous root kit fiasco (Google "sony rootkit lawsuit")
infected thousands of customers computers via anti-consumer software,
I should have known better than to ever
let Sony software run on my PC. But I wanted to get my new MP3 player to
working fast, so I followed Sony's instructions. Bad idea!!! They want
you to plug the Sony into a USB port and then run the install
software that's already in the Sony. I tried this on my old XP (SP2)
machine, and the Sony installation tried to "upgrade" my windows Media
player. There was no benefit to me for this "upgrade", Sony's
"engineers" we apparently too lazy to design an installer without this. Or
maybe they're still trying to infect their customers with rootkits.

Anyway, the install of the new MS media player failed, and in the deal
corrupted my old MS-media player. Since I primarily use VLC media
player the was just just an annoyance, not a fatal problem - but now my
old XP PC has no MS media player. Thanks, Sony :-(

Being stubborn (and a geek) I then decided to examine the Sony MP3 player a
bit more carefully on my work Windows-7 machine. The Sony mounted as a
USB device named "Walkman", but instead of just running Sony's toxic
installer again, I poked around in their file system and found
the music folder. It had a few mp3 files in it, so I decided to see
what would happen if I copied in a few more mp3 files. I did a drag &
drop with windows explorer, the Sony rebuilt the playlist with them.
There they were, playable - it worked! I then select all my mp3 files, about a
100, and dragged them over. Thanks to the magic of USB 2.0, in 10
minutes I had 100 tunes loaded - without running any Sony Windows software. They
all list and play just fine. Why did Sony provide that destructive
install and "Content Transfer" software when you can just drag & drop
files? Why not just tell customers how to load up the files in one easy
step like I did? Write a simple GUI for those who want elaborate
play-lists or auto-synch with an online service, and let the rest
of us just load & go.

But once I had some files in place I discovered the upside of this
device - It sounds great! My kids all have iPods, and this thing sounded
at least as good right out of the box, and at a fraction of the price.
I'm something of an audiophile and plan to experiment with upgrade ear
buds (the ones that come with it are pretty tinny) and maybe a headphone
amp. Just for grins, I put a pair of Sennheiser HD280 studio headphones
on the Sony - and it sounded really good! Like most MP3s the highs where
a bit slurred and mushy, but the mids and bass were clear and as loud as
I could want, even without a phones amp. The dinky Sony could drive the
large form-factor Sennheisers just fine :-). The better MP3s sound
almost like WAV files played on real high-end audio equipment. I'm
optimistic than when I get some lossless formats in there I'll have a
really good sound.

I've tried hooking my kids iPods (Nano and classic) to real stereo
equipment and never had results like this. The Sony/Sennheiser combo
beats the pants off any iPod I've heard hooked to anything.

When I was done setting it up I unplugged the USB I'd been using to
charge the battery, and tossed the player in my backpack, without
thinking to turn it off. That night I got another nice surprise - it was
still playing (4 hours later) and the battery was still fully charged.
I'm not sure how many hours they claim, but I didn't really believe I'd
get more than 5 or so in actual use. I'm now sure I'll get 10 or more.

In fairness to Sony, I must add that we've also had Apple software
nightmares with my kids iPods, like the time one kid went to
"synchronize" and iTunes erased her entire mp3 collection. She was
in tears! I write software for a living, and bugs like Sony
and Apple have should never get past QA.

Bottom line is this unit will give you great sound for cheap; but you
have to be either very lucky or willing to move files manually to use
it safely.

60 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent First Impression, September 11, 2009

By 

Peter Just (Williamstown, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sony Walkman NWZE345BLK 16 GB Video MP3 Player (Black) (Electronics)

I've only had this puppy for a day, so I can't comment on the very important subject of its reliability. Also, I don't have much interest in using the Walkman for video replay, so I don't have much to say about that, either. But my first impression is favorable. The design is sleek, the controls are intuitive, the interface is efficient, and at 16GB the storage capacity is as large as you'll get in a sub-compact flash drive player. The FM radio tuner is surprisingly sensitive.

The obvious point of comparison is to the iPod Nano, which also comes in a 16GB version. The Walkman is a bit wider, thicker, and heavier than the Nano, but it's also a bit shorter. There are three big differences in my view: the Walkman has a radio, it has much better audio quality and it's significantly less expensive. To me those differences are absolutely decisive, especially the difference in audio reproduction: It takes the Sony to make you realize how truly mediocre iPod sound is.

If you want this thing primarily as a sub-compact MP3 player for listening to music I can recommend it based on a brief acquaintance so far. I'd also recommend springing for a really good set of earbuds (Shure, Ultimate Ear, and Etymotic are among the better producers). The earbuds shipped with the Walkman or an iPod are pretty miserable.