Very Good
Sony's Walkman line recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, and the latest iteration of a brand that was born a portable cassette player is by far the most ambitious. The NWZ-X1051, aka the Walkman X Series, is available in 16GB ($299) and 32GB ($399)—the same capacities and prices as the iPod touch. Wi-Fi enabled, with a touch screen and the integration of popular Web services like Slacker Internet radio and YouTube, the Walkman has evolved into a robust music and video player. There's also built-in noise cancellation, and the player comes with a pair of earphones that sound great when combined with the user-adjustable EQ. My only major complaint: The Web experience isn't great—Sony's browser is no match for Apple's Safari. And you don't get access to an
App Store with thousands of titles that comes with the iPod touch. Even so, the X Series Walkman is a well-designed device that's the best non-iTunes-centric player you can buy.
Measuring 3.8 by 2.1 by 0.4 inches (HWD), the all-black X Series boasts a super-crisp, 3-inch, 432-by-240-pixel organic light-emitting diode (OLED) touch screen and a unique sparkly (but not overly flashy) body that resembles a cross-cut slab of granite. Our Editors' Choice for portable media players, the iPod touch, has a 3.5-inch screen with a slightly higher resolution (480 by 320), but the touch is also bigger than the X Series. Because the touch's screen is larger, both devices offer similar levels of sharpness.
The display consumes most of the front panel but, like the iPod touch, the X Series features a Home button that returns you to the player's main menu with one click. Included with the device: better-than-average earphones with noise cancellation capabilities; a proprietary-to-USB cable for moving files from your PC to the device; an audio cable that uses the proprietary connection to send audio to mini-jack (3.5mm) aux inputs on speakers and docks; an airplane adapter; a Quick Start Guide; and a CD with Windows Media Player 11, Napster, and content transfer programs. The best inclusion: a coupon for 100 free songs from Sony MusicPass, something you definitely won't get that with an iPod!
About those noise-canceling headphones: You won't get the quality of noise cancellation from them you would from a pair of Bose QuietComfort 'phones, for example, but the level of cancellation is adjustable, and you can even choose between Bus/Train, Airplane, or Office, or you can turn it off altogether. It's important to note, however, that the feature only works with the bundled earphones. In other words, if you want upgrade, you lose the noise canceling capability. That said, Sony's user-adjustable EQ allows you to sculpt the audio to sound pretty amazing using the supplied earphones.
I usually don't advocate utilizing a player's "extra bass" features, but Sony's True Bass is an exception. It increases the sound's low end in a way that the earphones can handle, and without it, the audio sounds thin. After tweaking the highs and mids and turning up the True Bass level, the earphones, which fit quite well, sound awesome—a rare achievement for bundled earphones. The out-of-box listening experience, frankly, kicks butt when compared with what you get with the iPod, with its subpar included earbuds and lousy EQ presets.
The user interface and overall operability of the player are the Walkman's strengths. Sony has yet to abandon its icon-based main menu, and it does look a little outdated compared with Apple's menu system, which has better graphics. Still, it's intuitive, and each menu pulls up a new submenu option, but they are generally useful, and specific to whatever you're doing at the time—options for adjusting the Now Playing screen appear in a submenu when you're listening to music, for instance. The tactile buttons on the player's frame respond well—sometimes too well! It's easy to accidentally hit Play/Pause as your fingers search for places to rest that won't set off something on the screen. You can easily remedy this by using the Hold button.
File support is somewhat limited. For audio, the player supports only MP3, WMA, AAC (unprotected), L-PCM—but not FLAC, AIFF, or WAV, although it does support WMA Lossless. Video support includes AVC (H.264/AVC), MPEG4, and WMV. Photo support is limited to JPEGs.
As for the touch screen, now that plenty of players have them, I can say this is one of the better implementations I've seen, but it's not the best. The iPod touch is more responsive to your finger taps, and it supports the very useful pinch-to-contract-or-expand feature. The X Series' screen occasionally requires an extra tap, or selects the item next to the one you meant to tap, but other players—like the Samsung P3—have similar issues. But overall, graphics and touch response on the X Series are much better than on the Samsung player.
The player supports 802.11g Wi-Fi, and connecting to a wireless network with the player isn't exactly a breeze—entering the password is cumbersome, and the player asks you for more info about your wireless network than you might know offhand, but once it's set, the Walkman remembers your info, so it's only a one-time annoyance. And for that pain, you get some excellent features, like YouTube. One press of an icon on the main menu gives you access to a selection of the popular videos from the site. And the size of the player's screen is perfectly suited for these low-res streaming files. If your Wi-Fi signal is decent, there's not much downtime during the viewing process, and the search options are pretty inclusive: Featured, Most Viewed, Keyword Search, and Related Videos. The integration is seamless, and the best I've seen since the iPod touch.
For when you get tired of your own tunes, Slacker, the excellent free Internet radio service, is also here. Tapping its icon after registering your Walkman's device ID at Slacker's Web site gives you access to your account on the player. While the service takes some time to initially load your stations, once the process is completed, you're good to go. Slacker lets you create customized channels around artists you like, or choose from scores of expertly programmed genre stations. And you don't need Wi-Fi to access the music; stations are cached, so you can listen without a connection. One of the best features of Slacker is its robust artist bios, and these are easily accessible—while you're listening to music by that artist—via a pull-down menu.
The major downfall on this device: The Web browser is weak. Entering characters in fields isn't any easier than entering passwords. And the on-screen keyboard buttons are too small and easily triggered. But the main issue is that the browser has trouble loading most sites that the iPod loads in a jiffy, like the New York Times homepage or PCMag.com.
Videos and photos look great on the bright OLED screen, and thanks to the accelerometer the player switches between horizontal and vertical mode depending on how you hold it. Like most touch-screen devices, playback controls, as well as submenu options, appear when you tap the screen while a video is playing. There are also the manual playback buttons on the player's top panel. One gripe I have about the video player: It loaded several videos it doesn't support. In other words, if you drag a file onto the device that's not supported, instead of getting an error message on your PC, the file will still load—and take up precious space—but it won't play.
Side by side, with both players at their brightest screen settings, the Walkman seems more capable than the iPod touch of displaying deeper blacks and very bright whites simultaneously. The touch's screen is quite bright, but at its highest brightness setting, the black background becomes a bit paler, as do darker shades in images.
You also get an FM tuner with simple, good-looking graphics that appear to manually scroll through the dial while you drag your finger. There's no recording function, but the auto-scan function works like a charm; there are 30 presets, which you can choose to select manually or let the player assign to the stations with the best reception.
Sony rates the battery life for the X Series at 33 hours for audio playback and 9 hours for video. Here in PCMag.com's Labs, we were able to squeeze out 24 hours and 10 minutes of audio playback in our battery test.
Is the Sony X Series Walkman as mighty as the iPod touch? No. But it is the best non-iTunes player you'll find. For those who live in a Windows Media Player world, this is your iPod touch, unless the forthcoming Zune HD can top it.
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The Zune HD wait is nearly over. Microsoft have now announced that their Zune HD will be available on September 15th at various online stores such as Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart and the MS store. 
