The Sony NW-E005 is a portable MP3 player with USB connector. It comes in a variety of colours, blue, silver, violet, black, and lime green and a range of additional accessories can be purchased separately such as arm bands and cases. It uses internal flash memory starting from 512mb upto the maximum of a 2Gb model retailing at around the £90 mark. The player itself is no bigger then the current range of USB memory sticks on the market today measuring just over 79mm in length and 25g in weight. It features a one line OLED display, headphone jack and 3 user controls. The player comes with Sony’s own brand of software called Sonic Stage and bundled Sony Headphones.

The unique thing about the NW-E005 is it ability to provide 3 hours playback from just 3 minutes of charge via a computers USB port, or so Sony claim. This could prove an excellent feature for those of you who may want to use an MP3 player daily but do not always have accessibility to a charger or tend to forget that your battery is low proving useless for the next days use.

Unfortunately the player cannot be used as a plug and play flash memory drive and comes with Sonic Stage 3.4 to upload music to the device. The software is fairly user friendly but is prone to crashing on various occasions especially when transferring music. The interface on the player is well designed considering the one line display. It works like a tree system for example Album Name>Track Name. This in all fairness is probably the best Sony could achieve with such a small screen and was a wise move considering its main contender, the
iPod Shuffle which is screen-less.

The 2Gb model is able to hold upto 32 hours of MP3 audio encoded at 128kbits although using Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 encoding format this can be significantly more. Sadly you cant expect an FM tuner on the NW-E005 and usual features on larger HDD music players such as a calendar is regrettably just not feasible on such a small device.

Overall the NW-E005 is a sure contender in the low end flash memory MP3 market and looks to give current iPod shuffle owners something to think about. With its range of cute colours and remarkable battery life, Sony have got this one right.