The Walkman Player 3.0 software delivers a fine mobile music experience. The user interface is funky but straightforward to use and smooth to navigate. Within the media player options are the usual extensive mid-tier Walkman categories: albums, artists, tracks, playlists, genres, years, podcasts and audio books. You also get SensMe, the mood- and tempo-defined playlists you can compile from tracks copied from a PC, provided they have previously been assigned this information using Sony Ericsson’s supplied Media Manager software.
The player itself works extremely well. Cover art is supported and the auto-flip screen works here too. Sound quality is extremely high for a mobile phone – Sony Ericsson does this music phone stuff very well.
Whether the slider’s up or down, handling is nicely balanced
The supplied earphones are mid-range grade, so are better than average rather than of stunning quality. Still, sound reproduction is satisfyingly rich and detailed. While the two-part headset plugs into the phone using an unwieldy proprietary all-purpose connector on the side rather than top, the headset has not one but two 3.5mm sockets midway. This splitter provides the option not only of adding your own higher quality headphones, but also of allowing a friend to listen in too.
You can also listen using the loudspeaker, which is a typically tinny when cranked up, but is capable of hitting surprisingly high volume levels.
To go with the basic 40MB of internal user memory, there’s a 2GB Memory Stick Micro card supplied. Cards up to 8GB are supported if you want to expand your music collection. The card slot is under a rather flimsy back panel cover, but unless you’re constantly swapping, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.
Tune-loading is similar to other recent Walkman phones – using the supplied USB cable and Media Manager software, you can transfer tunes from a PC, or you can simply drag and drop in mass-storage mode. Alternatively, you can slip in a pre-loaded memory card or send songs over Bluetooth.
COMMENTS
Bastards
"You can also listen using the loudspeaker, which is a typically tinny when cranked up, but is capable of hitting surprisingly high volume levels."
Oh great. Sony Ericsson have just made my daily commute a potential even more miserable experience. There should be a law against this sort of thing.
Memory Stick
Drop that proprietary rubbish, Sony, then I might consider using one of your phones.
no silly software
"you can simply drag and drop in mass-storage mode. "
Wish my jesus phone did that by default. I hate the pos that is iTunes. Thankfully I have now jailbroken it and with some clever SSH / Rsync and a new music player app - it syncs wirelessly.
@leo
I agree, thats really all thats missing from the walkman range. A lot of these phones are much of a muchness, which isn't a completely bad thing when they have this level of quality.
No gapless playback if it's like the W910i
I've got a W910i and it's a great phone but not a good music player since, like Sony's other current MP3 players, it doesn't do gapless playback.
If Apple (with the iPod) and Microsoft (with the Zune) can implement gapless playback, and considering that Sony *used* to do it with their ATRAC players, it doesn't seem too much to expect things that carry the Walkman brand to do it as well. Sadly they do not.
Shame, though the rest of the W910i works great.
