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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Delightful MP3 player, April 1, 2005
I have had this MP3 player for a week now and I am really happy with it. It is feather-weight, sounds excellent, display is great and battery indicator is still at 100%. It can also be used as a USB device to carry data files. My only irritation (and the reason for 4 stars instead of 5) is the requirement to use Sony's Sonic Stage to tranfer files to it.
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57 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Fake mp3 player!, March 22, 2005
Got mine 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.
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18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderfully lightweight and amazing battery life, March 23, 2005
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.
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