Straight out of Star Trek, Sindre Lia reviews Sony's new NW-A1000 walkman audio player - you know, the one that looks like its entire front panel is one gigantic display.
Review summary of the Sony NW-A1000:
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 Stylish looks propel the Sony NW-A1000 to an excellent score in the design department, but unfortunately things aren’t looking quite as good in terms of substance. Interaction with the onboard music library proved to be a challenging affair, and although a 10-hour battery life is quite tolerable it is by no means impressive. In summary, the NW-A1000 is a solid choice for those with light to medium needs for carrying their music on the go - just make sure it’s handled with white gloves to avoid scratches. Release: December 2005. Price: $250.
Pros: Object of desire; good sound quality with proper earphones; crisp display
Cons: Mediocre out-of-box sound performance; sub-par music library interaction; scratch-prone
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Full Sony NW-A1000 Review:
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Featuring a 1.5" OLED screen and 6 GB hard drive, the Sony NW-A1000 certainly has first impressions going for it; a translucent acrylic coating creates the illusion that the front of the unit is one huge display. At 88 x 55 x 19 mm and 109 g it's also decently sized - but incomprehensibly lacks a carrying pouch to protect its extremely scratch-prone surface. Nevertheless, the player improves greatly on the design of previous HDD-based audio players from Sony - in fact, we found it to be the most stylish-looking audio player we've reviewed to date.
When connected to a computer via its USB 2.0 cable, the Sony NW-A1000 acts like a mass storage device. For music files to be imported into the NW-A1000's music library, however, it's required to transfer them via the bundled 'Connect Player' software. Unfortunately, as with so many homegrown music managers, the software is only of average quality at best. On a more positive note, the NW-A1000 supports MP3 files in the true sense of the word, as well as the proprietary ATRAC3 and ATRAC3+ audio formats.
Furthermore, the NW-A1000 sports a bright and clear OLED screen, well-placed navigation and action buttons as well as a comfortable button for delightfully hassle-free volume adjusment. The icon based menu interface didn't harbour the most intuitive icons we've seen, however, and the player also exhibited intermittent latency issues when accessing the hard drive. Advanced features mitigates this to some extent, though, including the Artist Link feature which offers quick access to related music.
An Equalizer has also been incorporated, offering 4 preset modes including Heavy, Pop, Jazz and Unique, as well as two custom modes. When connecting the bundled set of earphones to the NW-A1000, we immediately discovered that a custom mode was required to add at least some bass to the sound image - which otherwise proved well-rounded. Connecting a set of third party earphones yielded quite an improvement in bass, although the NW-A1000 still left something to be desired with regard to gain.
Sony claims a battery life of up to 20 hours for the NW-A1000; chop this in half, and you'll get what we were able to squeeze out of the player during our test period.
Availability
The Sony NW-A1000 is currently available in Europe and North America, bearing price tags of approximately €250 EUR and $250 USD, respectively.
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