Sony Walkman NW-A3000 20 GB

Sadly i feel the Sony NW-A3000 has been hit badly by the typical reacton of "lets compare this to the i-pod", the problem with this reaction being that the Sony loses a lot of marks for its own innovations and quality as an mp3 player in exchange for a lot of "but i pods do this and that". So to begin with I'd like to say I am activly choosing not to do this typical comparison, and instead talk about Sony players advantages and disadvantages in regards to their own merits. The price is incredibly fair for an mp3 player of such memory capability and quality, often a good few tens of pounds cheaper than other players in its class. This may ...  Read the complete review

I bought one of these players about three (maybe four actually) years ago, and its still going strong. I think I paid 159.99 for it, it's the 20gb purple one. I bought it from Comet and took out the three year insurance on it, which actually paid off in the end as I will explain later. The player is quite heavy and bulky compared to the new ipods such as the ipod nano, I actually bought a 16gb nano a few weeks back and the size and weight difference is enormous. The player never let me down, it always worked as it should, no problem there. The software you use to manage the player is called SonicStage and is fine, its user friendly and you can easily view your music, ...  Read the complete review

So, the sony walkman. I've had mine for two years now - I guess this won't be of much use to anyone who wanted to buy something completely new - I believe they've discontinued it, sadly. But along wth other reviewers, I am saddened by the continual comparisons to the iPod: '20g? How many videos is that?' well if you want to watch videos, you can buy either a TV or a computer. So the reply comes: 'None. It doesn't do videos'. This is strangly settling, don't you think? We have a generation of children who want their MP3 players to do everything for them; the NW-A3000 is pure simplicity. It just gives you what you want to hear. So then comes another iPod ...  Read the complete review

I got this as a birthday gift near the start of the year, back then I felt the price was a little steep but at the sametime reasonable because of the Sony nametag. Main reason I thought it was steep was because there was no colour screen just a basic LCD and the features were minimal and basic (Playlists, Shuffle, Repeat) although I feel most people wouldn't mind anything more than the basic features so it's not much of a disadvantage. But it did have features like intelligent shuffle which allowed it to shuffle with only certain rated songs (all songs rated 5 stars) and songs from certain year etc. Battery Life - When I first got it, charged it up and put ...  Read the complete review

Whilst I'm aware that most people won't want to purchase such an old model, I still feel a certain responsibility in informing any potentional buyers of the utterly horrible experience I had as an owner of this Walkman. I won't go into the details of every aspect of the player because, quite honestly, my negative criticism is all that's required to deter anyone from making the purchase. "What can be so bad that it outweighs all of the good", you ask? "The Software", I answer. Like iTunes, the Sony software is unnecessarily convoluted, ugly and utterly pointless. Never before have I had to do so much to ...  Read the complete review