Electronics : Sony NWZA829K 16GB Video Walkman

Rating: - Great player, media manager a massive letdown
I do own an NW-808 as well but I cracked the screen so decided to buy this. Massive disappointment. There have been many bad points said about SonicStage, which came with 808. Personally I found it very easy to use, if a little clumsy in parts. However, the new interface with the 729 is appalling. You cannot rename or edit tracks on your player with it (nor with WMP). You cannot play tracks off the player through your computer. You cannot select which way you view your files (eg sorted by album, artist or track). It freezes constantly (have had to cancel a few transfers already). There is no ATRAC format on the 729, meaning you have to reduce the MP3 size (I've got more music on my 8gb 808) with a very noticeable loss of quality. Pretty much all the album art is completely wrong (admittedly there could have been a mistake on my part somewhere?).
I've come back to edit, because it gets worse. When you manually enter a tracklisting, and then press enter, after wasting half an hour of your time, the tracks don't even change names! I'm taking mine back to Argos tomorrow, simply because the interface has been designed by a five year old. A five year old penguin.
I was expecting a lot more, as the 808 with the much derided SonicStage performed all the tasks I mentioned above. It seems that with trying to make it more user friendly (and to be honest, if you couldn't figure out SonicStage, you probably don't have thumbs anyway) they've made it as basic as possible, and, ironically, it's a thousand times less user friendly than before! I can't change my rating to 2 stars, but that's what I'm giving it. I give the 808 5 stars.
An annoying and frustrating piece of kit. I've carried on using my broken older model.

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Rating: - No AC Adaptor
Under Product Description, Box Contents, it says it comes with an AC Power adaptor. It doesn't. All it comes with is a USB lead to charge it from a computer.

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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: - Truly amazing!
I really should start by saying that I only received this yesterday so haven't had a massive amount of testing / playing around with it yet, but the main thing of note here is the sound - it's truly outstanding. It sounds better than anything I have previously heard from and kind of sound source. The unit is very light and the video samples that are included really show what it's capable of. The video's are fluid and I cannot believe how good they look on something so compact. The in-ear phones that are bundled are a bit strange but they are brilliant. I won't be upgrading them anyway.

A couple of things I don't like though is that it doesn't appear to have a sleep timer. I have one of those sound asleep pillows and really need a sleep timer to take advantage of it. And my 2nd gripe is that it uses tags like iTunes does. I put over 2000 songs on there last night and found that they were named oddly and in no sort of order. I used a tagging program though last night and it managed to auto tag about 40% of them, but I still have a lot of work to do to get the rest properly tagged.

All in all this is a fantastic unit and well worth the money considering I paid the same 18 months ago for an iPod Nano 4Gb. Forget iPod, Sony produce a FAR better sound. It is an absolute joy listening to music again - all these songs have been given a new lease of life!

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Rating: - really fab
Well its been quite a while since I "treated" myself to an ipod at Christmas and had to send it back due to unacceptable sound quality. Took the plunge with the Sony walkman 16gb version of this without Bluetooth yesterday and I have to say the difference in sound quality is quite remarkable. I have been ripping using windows media player 11 (128 bit rate windows media) and it is really excellent.

I did think when I got the ipod it was sexy but they had skimped somewhere and it was not just on the headphones. With the Walkman the first thing that I noticed was the openness and natural midrange without hint of distortion found on the ipod. the top end was also a lot cleaner and songs retain a fantastic sense of drive and realism due to the natural tuneful bass. I listen flat but you can tune the bass without the sound going stodgy if you like a lot of bass.

For those who know naim audio for their domestic hifi, well I would say this is the equivalent in the mp3 market. It really retains the natural pace and drive in the music and makes you want to listen to it. It *is* that much better.

great job Sony.