Electronics : Sony NWZA828K 8GB Video Walkman with wireless headphones

Rating: - Luvs!
I deliberatly delayed writing a review until I had used everything on this player. And after 3 months, I still love it!

The player is tiny and fits into my pockets without looking daft. The sound quality is excellent. The video quality is great! The headphones completely make the package as it's great to do chores or run with them on and not have cords get in the way. (It does come with earbuds too)

The software is not great and requires you to pay to upgrade to compress movies. Try google for 'Any Video Converter' as it does the job brilliantly. Since that's easy enough to get around, I still give it 5 stars. And the easiest way to manage playlists is with Windows Media Player.

I love my new toy :)

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Rating: - All about the sound
Firstly, the most important thing when considering buying an mp3 player...what does it sound like? This player is without doubt the best sounding mp3 player on the market. The supplied in-ear headphones are excellent and manage to provide truly exceptional sound with a lot of bass. The also supplied bluetooth headphones, while not sounding as good as the in-ear, are still very good in their own right.

The player looks and feels great. While the player may not include extras that some other do, i.e f.m radio, playlists on the go (they have to be created on computer and downloaded onto player), what it does do it does very well. The menu's are all very intuitive and it is easy to navigate around the various functions of the player.

Along with the sound quality, another big selling point is the battery life. 36 hours for music and 11 for video. These times are reduced however if using the bluetooth headphones.

The player supports drag and drop, but will also work with other software apps such as windows media player or media monkey.

All in all, if you are in the market for a new mp3 player, then you would be a fool not to consider this sony player.

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Rating: - Arnibarnes
Very impressed.Easy to set up even for an old timer,plenty of settings for
sounds.Down loads very easy with the supplied CD.Other people have complained about the wireless element but I have had good reception up to twenty feet away.Both sets of earphones are good after you get used to the postions on the wireless ones.The display and information on the screen is excellant.Overall an excellant purchase.

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Rating: - Very disappointed
I purchased the A828 to replace my almost dead Creative Zen Micro and had high expectations after reading a lot of very positive reviews online.

Sadly the product did not live up to what I hoped it would. I expected Sony to provide software for video conversion from a handful of the most popular formats available but sadly they do not. That requires "upgrade" to their "pro" version of Media Manager which costs around £8. Annoyed at this I tried to find other software to do the job but found nothing which actually worked so I begrudigly paid Sony another £8 to upgrade. However to my disappointment it could not handle 90% of the videos I tried to convert. I have a lot of unprotected (i.e. plain DivX/XviD AVI with MP3 audio) video files which Media Manager "Pro" could not handle. I did manage to get one video converted but it had multiple audio tracks and did not allow me to select which I wanted to be used so ended up with Family Guy in German!

As far as the actual player goes it is so-so. The feedback from the buttons is inconsistent (i.e. the power button clicks but the back does not) which is highly annoying. The player and UI design are lovely though and I found using it easy. The screen quality is also very nice (hence why I wanted to put a few episodes of Family Guy and The Boondocks on it to watch when bored on the train when a full blown PMP is not that practical).

The wireless headphones are ok. I was scared I was going to break them though as they feel so weak. Pairing was easy enough, just turn them on and hold the bluetooth button on the player. However they NEVER seemed to reconnect as it said they would in the manual. Highly annoying as I had to press and hold the bluetooth button every time I wanted to use them.

The real killer for me though is a horrible hiss when using the bluetooth headphones on low volumes. I listen to a lot of acoustic guitar and the quiet parts were awful with hiss. Perhaps I just have a defective set (as nobody else seems to have this problem?) so I cannot write the player off totally as this is not present when using the wired headphones (which are not as great as everybody makes out, slightly better bass than the iPod phones but otherwise about the same).

Overall this player could be very good. A few small build issues let it down but the biggest flaw is the lack of conversion software. For a player which is advertised as handling video they should either support more formats on the player (and not need conversion) or supply some software which works with popular formats (such as DivX/XviD!).

It is no wonder that Apple are pretty much untouchable with a massive 70% of the market when Sony only go 80% of the distance required to make an excellent product. Media Manager Pro should be included for free (even the lame free version requires "activation"!) and support converting from the major formats (I can forgive DRM locked content as that is a different issue).

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Rating: - great
love it its really great you can pop it into your rucksack when your cycling and have no cables hanging out or to get caught up,on the headphones are plenty of controls volume power and track foward backward you soon get used to where they are without looking..very very easy to do music..but we have a new computer and cannot get dvds to transfer onto it..if anyone has a good way of transfering a dvd movie to it please let us know...