Sony NW-HD1

A serious competitor to the iPod at last? Nope, it's just more non-MP3 nonsense

You can imagine Steve Jobs' heart skipping a beat when Sony unveiled this potential iPod-beater. How relieved he must have been, then, when he got one in to play with and discovered Sony had scuppered a beautiful piece of hardware with an utterly ham-fisted piece of PC software.

It's a shame the software sucks so much, because this really is a lovely piece of kit - far smaller than the iPod, a whole 48g lighter and blessed with well over two times the battery life. Heck, it even comes with a cute little black docking station for charging and transferring files from your PC.

In use, it fits comfortably in the average palm, with the playback and navigation buttons falling nicely to hand. The screen's fairly good - bright and capable of cramming in lots of info - and there's a useful physical hold button underneath the player. When it comes to the user interface, things aren't quite so impressive - Rio's Karma (T3 97, 4/5) and Apple's iPod are both quicker at helping you find a specific song.

And so we come to getting music on the Walkman in the first place. Sony's PC music-management software is awful - especially when compared to iTunes or the new Windows Media Player 10. It's limited in functionality and clunky to use, but our main beef is that it appears to crash on a frequent basis, thinking about what it should be doing for minutes before finally operating as normal. This happens when importing files into the music library, selecting tracks to transfer to the device and on a generally random basis.

But the real problem comes if you've got an existing digital music collection in MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis or whatever. As this model only plays Sony's ATRAC3 format, files have to be converted before transfer to the player - a slow process that also reduces audio quality. If you're creating a digital collection for the first time, though, it's not so bad. ATRAC3 compresses music to half the size of most formats, so you'll be able to fit twice as many tracks on the Walkman as you could on an iPod.

The other bit of good news is that the battery lived up to its claimed 30-hour life. The player can't charge via USB, but it does power up quickly on mains - three hours fills up 80 per cent of the juice.

For all its stamina and gorgeous hardware, however, there's still a huge gulf between this and 20GB MP3 alternatives from Apple, Philips and Rio. The fact that it costs £80 more than its iPod rival doesn't help, either!

Posted by T3 Online on 2007-10-22