This tiny PMP fit in the palm of our hand and promised video, audio, photo and FM radio playback. Did the versatile little player stand up?
Review summary of the Sony Walkman NWZ-S615F:
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 The NWZ-S615F's defining feature is undoubtedly its size. For audio purposes, it is both functional, stylish and extremely portable, and the interface, despite leaving much to be desired, is extremely fast and stable. The device falls a little short on the video front, however, mainly because a tiny device also means a tiny screen. It works well for short-format clips like music videos and podcasts, however, and the sub-$100 price tag makes it look like a bargain, a rarity for Sony products. Release: August 2007. Price: $90.
Pros: Small size, fast-loading interface, attractive and functional Now Playing screen
Cons: No macintosh support, small screen size, no playlist creation in device
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Full Sony Walkman NWZ-S615F Review:
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Design - Very Good
The NWZ-S615F is tiny. Roughly the size of two Bic lighters, its button layout is very simple, with a flat D-pad and three raised buttons (two below the screen and one in the middle of the D-pad). The 2GB flash drive on the device seems a bit small for today’s standards, especially for a video device. We think Sony did an excellent job managing screen real estate, however, letting videos play horizontally on the screen to maximize their aspect ratio. The stated battery life is 33 hours for audio and 9.5 for video, and during our review period we never once had to charge it, and we listened to many hours of music and watched several movies. We admire the device's power management, as we noticed that after only a few seconds the LCD shut down, saving power.
Interface and Transfer - Good
We liked the main menu, which had nine selections that never required more than two clicks on the D-pad. Conveniently enough, holding down the raised Back button brings you back to the home screen, and holding down the option button powers off the device.
Visually the submenus were less impressive, though we did like the black background, which made everything extremely easy to read. We also liked how we could see thumbnails of the album covers when browsing for songs by album. There is a top-level search option that lets you type in letters to search, although we can see this being more convenient for large libraries, which really won’t fit on a 2GB device.
Navigation through the menus was extremely quick, and we experienced absolutely no lag, even when viewing videos, long or short. We wish we could have made playlists directly on the device. Scrolling through our songs wasn’t as easy or as fast as we’d like, but the device did show the letters we were scrolling through along the top of the screen to give us a better idea of where to stop. With no wheel or touch device for scrolling, we would have liked Sony to move things along more quickly.
The NWZ-S615F is Windows-only, so if you're an Apple devotee, look elsewhere (you probably already have an iPod anyway). For Windows users, the transfer process in Windows Media Player 11 is relatively simple, allowing us to sync whatever folders we selected and manually add or delete songs and videos. Speeds were on par with other USB 2.0 devices, but on-the-fly transcoding with MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) was extremely slow, taking about a minute for every minute of video. Files could be added manually in Explorer, but we found using WMP11 easy enough that it became our method of choice.
Audio - Very Good
The NWZ-S615F supports MP3, WMA and AAC for audio playback; while this certainly covers the most popular formats, we still would have liked to see some lossless support so we could play our FLAC or OGG files. The audio quality and amplification was decent, but the included headphones were terrible, and we wouldn't recommend using them at all. For anything.
The Now Playing screen displays the track title, artist, album, genre and year, as well as the album art if it is attached to the song. With no touch sensitive screen or buttons and no wheel, scrubbing to a particular point in a track isn’t possible, and subsequently quickly traveling to a point in a song is less than convenient.
When playing a song, the screen will go dark if inactive for a few seconds, but will occasionally come to life with a clock display. Photo slideshows can be played and controlled while listening to music, and we loved that we could play and pause the music while navigating the slideshow. We wish there was a bit more flexibility in photo formats, only JPEG is supported, but it is by far the most common and has a decent compression rate, so we’re not too upset.
The included FM radio is pretty bare-bones, but functional enough. We got good reception on a few major radio stations here in New York, but there was no record feature, and while presets could be saved and even automatically found, we didn’t like that we had to tap the down button repeatedly to scroll through the radio dial, because when we held the button down the radio would automatically stop at the first station that came through strong enough.
Video - Very Good
Like all PlaysForSure devices, the NWZ-S615F is designed to play purchased, DRM’d video files from sources like CinemaNow, but both the available library and implementation into Windows Media Player 11 don't come close to the iTunes Music Store. While the disappointing library of DRM content didn't bother us too much, the device’s sheer contempt for other formats did. It played H.264 and MPEG-4 videos, which are common enough, but with only two formats supported, the NWZ-S615F falls short here.
Attempts to import files encoded with the popular DivX codec onto the NWZ-S615F result in the MTP immediately transcoding the file for playback onto the device. We’ve documented how slow the process is and how terrible the resulting video quality was when this happened with the Toshiba T400. The only videos we were able to play with any success on the player were home videos encoded in WMV format, although we assume similar success could be had with PlaysForSure movies downloaded from CinemaNow or other outlets.
The video we were able to play properly on the device looked good; the LCD fought off glare well and the images looked clear and crisp. Only the video’s most basic information was viewable in the menus, we also liked how videos resumed from our previous spot in playback, but we would have liked to have the option to start from the beginning or to resume from the last point stopped during playback. Overall, the experience was average, about what we’d expect for such a tiny device playing video.
Accessories - Good
The NWZ-S615F comes bundled with a CD-ROM (packing the Napster, WMP 11 and mp3 conversion software), a pair of headphones, a USB cable and a quick start guide. It includes everything one would seemingly need to watch videos and play music on the device, although a case to protect it would have been nice, as would a wall charger so that we wouldn’t need a computer to charge the device.
Price and availability
The Sony Walkman NWZ-S615F will start selling for $90 () in August 2007.
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