Excellent MP3 player

I've had this unit for a while now and it has turned out to be an excellent purchase. It is well-built, well-designed, sounds great, and overall works really well.

The unit comes with very nice earbuds; they're not the crappy earbuds that most MP3 playes come with. Although the cord is a little short (even with the included extender) they give you really great sound without requiring that you put down another $100 for good earphones. There is a very wide range of equalizer settings and various other ways to tweak the sound to your preference. All together, this gives the unit excellent sound quality. It is easily better than the iPods I have (a first gen Nano and a regular iPod). However, it is not quite as good sound quality as my old Sony NW-F705.

The unit is solidly built and feels good in your palm; its solid, sleek, and not too heavy. The interface is simple and easy to use, and more or less self-explanatory. Sonicstage is gone, and you can now transfer music with WMP or simply by dragging and dropping. I'm not a big fan of WMP so its nice that I don't have to use it. Playlists still have to be done via WMP though, which is really one of the few gripes I have with the unit. The interface is quite responsive, unlike other Sony players I've used.

The battery life is excellent. Its rated for 33 hours, and that is probably very close to the truth. I use it several hours a day and only charge it every other week.

I personally think that video playback on MP3 players is a gimmick, so I don't put much stock in it. That said, this unit has the best screen for its size that I've seen. It has great resolution and image quality, and relatively speaking, its quite large. For its price and size, its the player to go with if you insist on watching videos on an MP3 player.

One thing I miss from other Sony designs is the jog dial. Like most MP3 players of this size, its not very friendly for "eyes closed" operation. So if its in your pocket or something, you'll probably need to pull it out to navigate the menus if you want to do anything other than pause/play or skip songs. The jog dials on other Sony players let you do a bit more than that, without requiring that you actually look at the player. Similarly, while it lets you select different equalizer settings via the menu, you can't switch settings quickly. It would be nice to have a way to quickly change settings without going through the menu (a nice feature found on the NW-F705).

Most of the downsides of this player is just nitpicking though. Its a great player; it sounds great, its easy to use, and it keeps playing for a long, long time.