Definite iPod competitor (Sony Walkman NWZ-S639F 16 GB)

Member Name: AbsintheFairy

Product:	Sony Walkman NWZ-S639F 16 GB
Date:	24/05/09 (239 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Ease of use, sound quality, features

Disadvantages: Appearance (as opposed to the iPod)

I got this just after Christmas when my old mp3 player (a Creative Zen Micro) packed in (My laptop gave up at the same time - I think my electronic items like to conspire against me). Deciding I wanted a 16GB mp3 player, so that I could put all my music on it (the Creative was only 4GB), I was torn between an iPod and the Sony. Though sorely tempted by the purple iPod, with it's beautiful design, I went for the Sony - largely because it was almost half the price.

Though it's not as pretty as the iPod (and it's not purple), the Sony is far from ugly, being very small, light and compact. It makes the Creative Zen look like a brick in comparison. The Sony is available in three colours: black, red and silver - I went for the silver, which has orange edges.

I have heard a lot of people say that the sound quality of the Sony is better than the iPod. Now I have never actually listened to an iPod, and I'm not a great judge of these things anyway, but the sound quality of the player does seem to be excellent, and I often find myself hearing things in the music that I'd never heard before. The supplied headphones are good quality - I often get incredibly irritated by in-ear headphones falling out while I'm walking to work but these almost never do. Just make sure you use the right earbuds to fit your ear - the headphones come with medium earbuds as default and small and large ones are included in the pack if you need to change sizes.

You can listen to music by album or by artist, play all songs at random, or try 'Intelligent Shuffle' which includes a fun feature called 'Time Machine Shuffle' - enabling you to listen to all songs from a particular year. There are also the 'SensMe' Channels, which analyse your songs according to mood and put them in a particular stream, e.g. 'Upbeat', 'Extreme', 'Pop Ballad', 'Classical' and more. The song choices are odd sometimes - The Corrs in 'Extreme' for example - but overall this feature is quite fun.

The player is ideal if, like me, you use Windows Media Player to listen to music, and don't want to mess around with iTunes and the like. I find using the 'Sync' feature on Windows Media Player to be the easiest way to transfer music over to the player, and this has the advantage of copying the album art as well. However you can also use click-and-drag via Windows Explorer, or use the content transfer wizard. Pictures and videos can also be transferred too, and you can use a picture of your own to personalise the background display.

The player is compatible with BBC iPlayer. Now I haven't got enough internet bandwidth to go downloading iPlayer programmes, but judging by the included videos, the picture quality is excellent, and judging by the online tutorial from Sony, the procedure to transfer programmes is simple. Once I move house and get some proper internet I'm looking forward to giving this feature a try.

The battery life is excellent too - I listen to the player every day walking to work and back, which is at least an hour, plus on occasion at the weekends, and I only find myself needing to charge it roughly once a fortnight.

The player is charged through the computer, and no external charger is included, but this is pretty standard.

Summary: Brilliant

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