What good is 22 hours of battery life if the interface is a royal PITA to use?

Does Sony seriously think their player (can't call it an MP3 player) will not only compete, but dominate the iPod? What a joke. Its flaws are huge and glaring:

1. Apple gets flack for not playing WMA files on the iPod. Well at least you can play some open standards on the iPod. Sony makes you change everything into their proprietary format, protected or not.

2. Their claim that it only plays ATRAC because its higher quality is totally bogus for MP3's you already have. The quality is not going to get better when you encode into ATRAC, that's impossible. It can only stay the same or degrade, the latter being more likely because you are changing formats.

3. In order to fill the player, you'll have to have twice as much available HS space for converted MP3's: 20 for the original MP3's, plus another 20 for the converted ATRAC files.

4. Who wants to carry around a cradle all the time?! This totally negates any size/weight advantage of the Sony. Plus, even if you do carry around a cradle, you have to plug it into the computer and the AC EVERY FREAKING TIME!!

5. As far as aesthetics, the player is barely smaller than the iPod, and certainly is not more distinctive. It looks not all that different from all the other dime a dozen players out there. The iPod stands out, most people recognize it, which definitely has contributed to its success.

6. The Dell DJ got toasted by the iPod even though the price was lower. Now, Sony thinks they can compete when their player costs 33% more?? What a joke.

I don't know what the Sony execs were smoking when they came up with this thing. Of course, they also sell a 256 MB flash player for $300, so I guess we can't expect much...

Anyone want to make bets as to how soon they cut the price or start giving rebates for sending them your iPod, like Dell did?

It doesn't have a prayer.

Any idea how the McDonalds Promo is going?

Honestly, it's foolish to say this is total crap.. but..

Sony happens to be a music company also.. a big huge Record Company.

They also Make the PS2 and the upcoming PSP.

The Sony Connect store is supposed to sell media to play on the psp in the future (ahem, almost typed p2p for a second there... )

Sony hates the mp3 format and will not let us use it.

How would you like to be a salesman in a store... convincing someone that the prevalence of mp3 and the usefulness of its functionality is overrated.

This thing sucks.

Apple is its own strongest competition.
How many iPods can it supply?
Can it license Fairplay?



Oh and... for a thurrott-like I-told-you-so.. I KNEW that Sony blows at software.. come on people. Same with all those guys.. MusicMatch should be fine and Roxio should be fine in this dept. but how on EARTH can SONY expect to compete with Apple on the software front?!

I would love to see Sony rejig its entire line, if Apple would only lisence Fairplay to them.


Interesting to see what life is like without the scrollwheel huh?

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Guest wrote:
What good is 22 hours of battery life if the interface is a royal PITA to use?

It will give you 10 hours to find the song you wanna play and 12 hours of functional use

Sony used to be a great company, but they've been doing more and more harebrained things lately. None of their current camcorder lineup can compete with a Sony I bought 5 years ago. They closed all their repair centers just as their defect rates skyrocketed. They botched MiniDisk by making the data and music versions utterly incompatible with each other. (They couldn't even use the same blank disks!) Some of the newer D8 camcorders can't even play Hi8. (Why else would you pick D8 over DV?) There is no reason why anyone other then Sony would want to use their memory stick format - which also has incompatible variations.

So far, only their videogame department has escaped unscathed. (We'll see about the PS-portible.)

Look how small that display is. I think that's the reason it can be smaller.That and an inferior control scheme. I'm sorry, I think I can deal with a larger unit that I can read and logically navigate through. Sony keeps making the same mistakes.

I suspect that if the Sony had been playing 128 kbps files rather than the truly anemic 48 kbps ATRAC files, its battery life would be a lot closer to the iPod's 12 hours...

the NW-HD1 is much lighter and 22hours of playback is when it s playing 128kbps when you play 48kbps you get 30 hours

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Anonymous wrote:
the NW-HD1 is much lighter and 22hours of playback is when it s playing 128kbps when you play 48kbps you get 30 hours

Where is a link to support this? I'm not doubting you, just wondering since I have not found anything that says the battery life is based on 128Kbps.

The biggest weakness the Sony faces is the music format. Regardless of what one says about the quality of ATRAC3+music originally provided in that format, the fact of the matter is you have to convert (read decompress and re-compress) all other formats into ATRAC3+ in order to load it onto the player. Things do not improve when being re-compressed, regardless of the algorithm used. You are putting lossy on top of lossy.

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Intruder wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:
the NW-HD1 is much lighter and 22hours of playback is when it s playing 128kbps when you play 48kbps you get 30 hours

Where is a link to support this? I'm not doubting you, just wondering since I have not found anything that says the battery life is based on 128Kbps.

More importantly, the songs at Sony's music store are encoded at a higher bitrate than 128 (I want to say 136... anyone have the exact spec?), so that should be the barometer for the NW-HD1's battery life.

I'm going to give Sony the benifitg of the doubt and say that consumers are stupid (Dell's market share proves this) and buy it. You have to wonder about reliablity. I mean, Sony used to be world renowned for it's reliablity, what with its walkmen, Hi8 cameras, and VCRs working for 20 years withou an issue. But Sony has gone down the drain. And I disagree with the person who said only thier systems are still reliable. I peg them as the worst of the pack. How many of us had to play with our PlayStations on their sides or upside down beacuse the drive motor was garbage?

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AFCdtLoeb wrote:
How many of us had to play with our PlayStations on their sides or upside down beacuse the drive motor was garbage?

Not me! (Go xbox, it's your birthday, go xbox)

On a side note, I think another thing that led to Sony going poo-poo (from what I've heard), is that the software that they have with all their hardware now is complete crap, like, all the stuff they include with their otherwise pretty good multi-format DVD burners is totally retarded and hard to use. The last thing I enjoyed from them was my minidisc player, which at the time was awesome, but with a 1-1 recording time and 80 minute discs now just seems so silly next to my 3G 20GB iPod

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AFCdtLoeb wrote:
And I disagree with the person who said only thier systems are still reliable. I peg them as the worst of the pack. How many of us had to play with our PlayStations on their sides or upside down beacuse the drive motor was garbage?

What the #@!$ are you talking about? the onli reason my playstation broke was cuz i opened it 4 sum reason.