It was only 18 months ago when this came out, so this is pretty good going for me.
Sony made a limited edition Franz Ferdinand MP3 player.
In my head, this was going to be a good update. Maybe not ‘funny’ or ‘informative’ but at the very least ‘colourful’.
[Drums fingers on table. Puts fingers on keyboard. Returns to drumming fingers. Clicks 'publish'.]
When I came to upload the accompanying picture for this post, I realised that I’d already covered one of Sony’s E-Series of MP3 players. The NW-E015F to be precise.
The problem is that you’d expect the E-Series to start with an E, not NW. How am I supposed to know which letter is the crucial one? After further investigation, I’ve discovered that all of the Sony MP3 players that I’ve covered have started NW. This can’t be a coincidence. NW must stand for something really obvious. Anyone?
Sony aren’t short of resources. They should plough a bit of cash into naming their products. That way people like me wouldn’t say they were shite, purely out of ignorant frustration.
It’s so hard to know what the difference between some MP3 players is. Maybe it’s our habit of only looking at the dimensions, memory size, battery life and the name of each product that hampers us.
The NW-E015F is part of Sony’s NW series or its NW-E series or maybe their E015F series. Who knows? Here’s what I do know.
Dimensions: 8cm long - too small.
Memory size: 2GB.
Battery life: Sony are a bit vague, but it looks to be 27 hours. That’s okay. Good even.
Name: NW-E015F - worldbeatingly unmemorable. Say what you like about the Squircle. At least you can remember it.
All the photographs accompanying the press release about Sony’s Walkman Video MP3 Player seem to incorporate vast quantities of white space all around the product.
It’s probably meant to make it look cool, but we’ve neatly sabotaged that by shrinking the photo to a ludicrous extent using a poor-quality program, thus rendering the image really blocky.
The NW-A800 is of course Sony’s first foray into the video MP3 player market. The battery life’s quoted as being 30 hours for just music, which isn’t too bad. However, the Walkman Video (wouldn’t Video Walkman sound better?) is under 9cm long, which is eminently loseable.
Maybe they could revert to the size of their original Walkman, which played cassettes. That was about the size of the average novel. There was no losing that bad boy. On the other hand, I had one that played everything fractionally too slowly unless you maintained a constant and quite heavy force on the play button while listening. It kind of ruined the portable aspect, constantly having to use two hands to hear things right.
Technological devices always have the catchiest of names. Witness Sony’s NW-S706F. People will be naming their pets after this bad boy.
The best feature of the NW-S706F seems to be the battery, which isn’t a state of affairs that Sony should be too proud about. They describe it as having ‘great stamina’ which isn’t a phrase you often hear about batteries. It means it should last about 50 hours, which seems long enough.
It’s 88mm long and has 4GB capacity. That’s all you really need to know.
MP3Gaze features portable media players from the simplest audio-only 128MB stick to the top-end all-singing, all-dancing video players, as well as headphones, docks and other related accessories. It is updated daily.
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