Yeah, I caved and got myself a 1GB flash based MP3 player:
(Mine’s black)
Sound Quality
As usual for a Sony product, excellent. It comes with AVLS — Sony’s fancy acronym for what basically artificially limits the volume to levels below that which would render you deaf by 30. Custom and preset equalizers, some form of normalization (not sure how it works, but it seems to) and of course, a decent pair of headphones. Not much more to say really.
Aesthetics
To say it looks good is an understatement. From the semi-transparent skin, to the flush screen, it’s all good. The front panel itself is actually a transparent plastic piece, with all wording and logos printed beneath it. Below the panel is then the actual layer that gives it colour. Quite a nice, subtle effect.
The flush screen is just awesome. It looks like they somehow managed to integrate the screen into the actual surface of the player — you can’t see the usual screen boundaries even if you try. The only hint you get that it’s just an effect is in the dark when you can see the backlight glowing around the square plate.
It comes in a really handy form factor too. It’s somewhat larger than the average thumbdrive, which makes it really easy to just slip into your pocket and forget about.
Interface
With a screen that small, I expected something of a headache when it came to navigating the various menus. Surprisingly though, most of the time it works well. I’ve not had to resort to reading the manual at all. The one irritating thing about the player was that it defaulted to beeping with each action (Next, Previous, Stop, Open menu etc.) but that was easy enough to turn off — Options -> Advanced -> Beep | Off.
The Software
SonicStage, the application used to manage the player quite frankly not going to win any awards. It’s alright for it’s stated job, but you won’t see me using it to play music regularly. Thankfully, there are various third party applications that work fine at managing the files on the player, and quite a few of them are Java based, which makes this player Linux compatible. Shocking eh?
Verdict
Overall, a good buy. Sony needs a kick where it hurts for the disaster of SonicStage, but since there are many applications that do a good job of music management, it’s not so bad.