Sony pops cap on lippy-like music stick
But 'drip-proof response' feature absent, alas...
Someone at Sony - a man, probably - said the new Walkman NW-E013 looked like a lipstick dispenser, so now the compact MP3 player is being dispensed to women. It's other femme-friendly characteristics: a bright, glossy casing coming in an array of charming colours.
Sony's Walkman NW-E013: lipstick like
Actually, the NW-E013, with its shiny look and bright highlights makes it look like those free spray samples the glossies give away. But this is no freebie: Sony wants Japanese ladies to fork out ¥8980 ($83/£40/€56) for it.
The player has 1GB of song-storage, ready for MP3-, WMA-, ATRAC- or AAC-encoded tracks to be copied over from a PC. Flip the cap to reveal the Walkman's USB (2.0) connector. Sony claims the player will play music for 30 hours on a single charge of the gadget's built-in battery - which will give you three hours' playback if you just charge it for a for-God's-sake hurry-up-I'm-in-a-rush three minutes.
Sony's Walkman NW-E013: palm friendly
So far, so standard. However, I was attracted to the NW-E013's "manoeuvrable button layout", which implies you can flip the switches around. Unfortunately, Sony hadn't flipped the switch on that part of its Japanese website, and I was unable to confirm this.
Come to think of it, this is probably just a quirk of Google's translation software - Sony really means the buttons are laid out sensibly. Another Googlism is the intriguingly entitled "drip-proof response" feature mentioned on the spec sheet. We'll have to remain in the dark on this one: the NW-E103 doesn't have it.
The 29g player's colours are black, violet, pink, blue and gold, but the in-the-earphones only come in black or white. The display is full colour: it's a three-line LCD.
The Hardware Widow is hitched to a young, hardware geek - the
Tech Obsessed Youth - who thinks he knows more about technology than she does...
COMMENTS
@N
Funnily enough, my wife got one of the 1Gb Sony players described in this article and I had no real trouble with the SonicStage software, or in syncing the player with Windows Media Player 11.
Whereas the trouble with iPod Nano was that I spent two weeks trying to make iTunes work on the computer and it wouldn't open because of a Quicktime buffer overload problem that could not be fixed or removed in any fashion known to any tech savvy person on the internet.
Twenty minutes to get used to the Sony player with Sonicstage and everything just worked - two weeks with iTunes and the iPod Nano and nothing worked at all.
So I disagree with you vehemently.
Drip-proof...?
I thought it was foundation that was usually drip-proof, not lipstick.
(But then what do I know? I'm a bloke....)
No...
The thing is huge for a 1 Gb player. And expensive too. Must have a huge battery... I mean, my old nano is not much bigger than that.
i am wondering...
...why the company that invented such small cassette-based walkmans are still knocking out such massive mp3 players. absolutely bizarre. I don't know anybody that's bought a Sony mp3 player and been happy with it.
Sony: give me a call, i'll help you design something customers will actually want!
cheap but you pay for it.
you can get the 4gb NW-E016 from currys/dixons etc for £54. However I don't recommend it. No drag and drop meaning you have to use the absymal sony supplied SonicStage software, I wanted to gouge my own eyeballs out after 10minutes of using it. When you give up with that there are some alternative software suggestions found on the sonicstage wikipedia article but none of them are satisfactory. Sort it out Sony, I took mine back and got a nano- it was worth paying that much more for something that worked easily.
