Tech 16 Aug 2005 02:47 pm
Review - Sony Network Walkman NW-E407
Yes, the title of this entry answers the question of which player I chose. I got the NW-E407L: L for bLue (B is for black; why not B for blue and K for black?)
There are good things and bad things about this player. Most of the good things are in hardware, and most of the bad things are in software (including firmware).
The good points first: this thing is simply beautiful. The OLED display is very clear, the feel of the unit is very good (it is heavier than it seems, though) and the controls are well located, for the most part (although it’s hard to handle the unit when it’s in your pocket without accidentally pressing some buttons). Sound quality is very good, and it plays loud. One weak point is the earphone: it feels cheap, and it probably is; you can’t use the unit seriously without a new phone. And, of course, the feature that made me choose this player: it can play for up to 50 hours without recharges; an iPod won’t go over 12 hours.
The bad points: the software you have to install in your PC is very bad. Very, very bad. If you’ve read other reviews (as I had), many of them mention how bad this software is. Don’t believe them: it’s worse. I haven’t tried the bypass route yet, but it seems like it’s unavoidable.
One other problem is that the unit is not very good for playing podcasts: it will only play MP3 files if they are encoded with a 44khz sampling frequency, and that’s not very common for podcasts (22khz seems to be more frequent). The way to work around this is to convert the files to ATRAC3, Sony’s proprietary format, and their software (SonicStage) lets you do it with relative ease. But that’s just the beginning of your problems.
You see, you’d expect the desktop software to be aware of the limitations of your player and refuse to upload unplayable files; but that would be a good thing, and, as we’ve already covered, this software has no good features. Instead, it let’s the player tell you that it “CANNOT PLAY” the files, and you have to find out why. Well, after you do, you right click on the file and select “Convert format…”. After the conversion, the same library entry will refer to two files (as you can see if you right click on it and select “Properties -> File Info”). At this point, if you chose to transfer the file to the player, you’d expect SonicStage to do the right thing and send the ATRAC3 file. It doesn’t; it sends the MP3 file, and there’s no way (that I can see) to change this. You have to delete the MP3 file (not from the library, but from the file system) for it to work.
As Chandler would say, could they be more stupid? Hard to see how.
But they try. They make available a tool to bulk-convert files from MP3 to ATRAC3, which sounds good once you’ve resigned yourself to live with it. After downloading and installing the tool, though, it refuses to run because it needs “SonicStage 2.1 or later”. You’d think SonicStage 3.0 (included in the CD that comes with the player) would suffice, but their definition of “later” seems to be different from mine.
Other than that, there are a couple of minor annoyances. The desktop shortcut for the PDF manual doesn’t work if your default browser is not IE; it opens www.programfiles.com instead, and it took me a while to figure out what was going on. The manual comes only in electronic format, by the way. The online registration process (which is also IE-only) did not accept the serial number of my unit, besides making me feel old (the last option for “age” is “over 30″).
What would make this a very good unit: the desktop software needs to be smarter (and easier to use). For example, it should convert files on the fly to ATRAC3 if it knows the player can’t handle them (alternatively, and even better, the player should play any MP3 file; it can’t be that hard). And it should come with decent earphones.
For the moment, I still think I can live with the problems, but if I get annoyed enough by the next weekend, I will consider returning it and getting something else instead (probably an iPod Shuffle). I’ll keep you posted.
