Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2004/09/28/review_sony_vaio_pocket/

Sony Vaio Pocket VGF-AP1L digital music player

Does colour screen + touch-sensitive control pad = iPod killer?

By Tony Smith

Posted in Personal Tech, 28th September 2004 15:40 GMT

Reg review You have to hand it to Sony. Having allowed Apple's iPod to take the lead in the hard drive-based portable digital music player market, the Japanese consumer electronics giant is battling hard to win it back. It's not pinning its hopes to one product but several. August saw the release of the NW-HD1 Network Walkman, and in October Sony will ship the Vaio-branded 20GB VGF-AP1. The Register took a look at a pre-production 40GB model, the VGF-AP1L.

It's undoubtedly a neat design. Early photos of the product suggested a bulky, ugly-looking thing. In the 'flesh' it turns out to be a compact unit about the size of a digital camera or an early iPod. Its design and construction shout out quality, leaving most rivals looking and feeling cheap and plasticky.

Sony Vaio Pocket VGF-AP1L

The landscape-oriented player's showpieces are a 2.2in, 320 x 256 colour display and what's perhaps the oddest control mechanism I've ever seen. Sony's GeSense is essentially a bumpy trackpad whose surface is mapped directly onto the display to control the cursor. Put your finger on the top left of the pad, and that's where the cursor appears on the screen.

The base of the unit is home to a proprietary connector that hooks up to the Vaio Pocket's docking cradle and provides pass-through for power, USB and line-out ports on the back of the dock. On top of the player sits a power slide-switch, which when pushed in the other direction locks the unit's controls. It's a nice systen but I found it too easy to turn the player off when you unlock it.

The remote control and earphone jack are on the top, too. The bundled phones come with a woefully short cable, so using the remote is de rigueur. Its three-line LCD provides the usual track data and the player's hierarchical menu, though the buttons are fiddly to use.

In your hand, the player feels solid but not heavy - it's 195g - and the matt dark silver-grey finish gives it a mid-range hi-fi feel. One end is rather thicker than the other thanks to a shiny black metal screw-on cover protecting the engineer-removable rechargeable battery.

Got the music in me

Like other Sony music players, the Vaio Pocket uses ATRAC 3 Plus, the latest incarnation of the audio format developed by Sony for its MiniDisc system. There's no doubt that it's a fine format, and with the accompanying earphones, the sound was crisp, with good detail and depth.

Any MP3s and WAVs you have can be copied across too, but Sony's SonicStage 2.0 software transcodes them as they go, into 48Kbps ATRAC 3 Plus. Ripping songs from CD offers more choice: a lossless PCM compressed format, ATRAC 3 at 66, 105 or 132Kbps, or ATRAC 3 Plus at 48, 64 or 256Kbps. Unlike iTunes, CD name searching isn't built in - you have to register separately in order to automatically grab album, artist and track titles, and other information.

Transfer is fast using USB 2.0. Conversion adds an overhead, but it's not as slow as I'd anticipated. The mass transfer of MP3s will take longer, but it's by no means impractical to maintain MP3s on your hard drive and live with the format conversion overhead.

More of an issue is the 48Kbps restriction. Transcoding from a higher bitrate down to a lesser one inherently yields a quality reduction, so it makes sense to allow users to choose the bitrate that works best for them. I ripped some CDs to a range of ATRAC 3 and ATRAC 3 Plus bit rates, and found 64Kbps to be an adequate baseline - sort of 128Kbps MP3 level. I'd have liked to have had the choice of transcoding MP3s to at least that level, if not higher.

64Kbps is certainly not hi-fi, but I found it fine for listening on the move or even in a reasonably quiet room. Audiophiles may protest, but they can rip CDs to a lossless PCM format, which the Sony player also supports. The higher rip rates provide scope for better quality music at the cost of lowering the overall capacity.

Play on

Sony Vaio Pocket VGF-AP1LThe Vaio Pocket's sound quality may be good - depending on your chosen bitrate, natch - but it's not the most responsive of devices. Playback isn't interrupted but I encountered numerous short but irritating pauses when skipping tracks, selecting menu options and so on. Pause a song and when you start playing it again there's a short delay while the hard drive spins up again in a way that just doesn't happen with an iPod.

That, plus the colour screen's necessary backlight, will have an impact on battery life. But my continous playback test yielded almost 24 hours' of music from a full charge. At that point, the battery indicator icon was flashing empty, but the player continued to play. I'd have carried on with the test, but alas I had to hand it back to Sony.

During playback, the screen shows not only the usual artist, album and track information, but also a thumbnail of the album cover art. Indeed, there's a entry in the player's main menu that allows you to browse through the machine's library using a panel of tiny cover art icons. It takes a few seconds to fill, as the players hunts through all the songs for cover art, but it's a neat visual alternative to browsing by names and the closest the digital world gets to thumbing through an LP collection.

Pushing any of the GeSense buttons on the far left or right of the panel pops up a navigation or control panel, respectively, each sliding right or left onto the screen. The panels aren't 'sticky' - take your finger off the GeSense area and the panels slide off screen again, which makes selecting the option you want more hit and miss than it should. As you move your finger or thumb over the GeSense area, the cursor moves accordingly. A push acts as a click.

With long menus, such as the main one or the list of all the songs on the device, you'll see up and down buttons appear in the left-hand panel. Using them is fiddly, though - it's much better you move your finger just above or just below the GeSense grid to auto-scroll through the list.

During playback, the right-hand panel provides play/pause, volume and track skip controls in one column, and repeat, shuffle and EQ controls in another. Pushing the EQ button cycles through the pre-sets, which are shown on the screen not as names but as icons reflecting the positions of the bars on the five-band equaliser that underpins it. Again, this emphasis is on visual cues rather than words.

A fourth button in the right-hand panel, with a heart icon, allows you to add songs to your personal playlist ('My Playlist'). There's only one of them, but at least you can edit it on the fly. It's accessed through the main menu. You're presented with the list of songs. Selecting a song and keeping up the pressure on the GeSense area changes the colour of the cursor and pops up a secondary menu. Here, you get to change the order of playback, and remove one or all the songs from the list.

The player remembers the songs you've listened to, recording their names in a series of My History lists. So if you want to find out what you were listening to last Thursday, you can.

Picture this

The photo viewer walks in broadly the same way, listing each download of images in a series of folders listed via the Photo Viewer entry in the main menu. A nice touch is the ability to pull pictures straight from a camera plugged into the dock's USB port.

Once on board, the pictures appear in a new folder. They're initially shown at a very low-res, to allow you to quickly move from one to other. An option on the right-hand pop-out panel flips the viewer from low-res to high, and there's a slide-show facility too. Your own music plays in the background. There's no zoom, and you can't rename or delete pictures and folders on the player. A third button sets the viewed photo as the album art of the song that's currently queued up.

Verdict

I came to the VGF-AP1L with some hostility - I'm pro iPod, anti Sony's stance on MP3 - but it won me over. I found it far more pleasant to use than I had been anticipating, less bulky and better designed. It's compact, well-built and its audio quality is superb. I liked it.

Sony has a reputation for build and design quality. The Vaio Pocket doesn't disappoint on either front. Consumers tend to be willing to pay more for Sony kit than they would for rival products, thanks to that reputation, and they're likely to pay more than the going rate for the VGF-AP1, though UK pricing had yet to be set when I wrote this.

GeSense is odd at first and may dissuade buyers when they try it in the shop. It's certainly a gimmick offered as an alternative to the iPod's trend-setting wheel-controlled UI, but it works. It's not as intuitive as Apple's UI and you can't use it one-handed, but then why would you? Most folk, I suspect, will spend more time operating the remote control.

The photo option is nice, but again, a gimmick. If I'm going to look a pictures on a tiny screen, I'd rather do it on my ubiquitous mobile phone. Or even my camera's LCD. Like the colour display, it's a nice feature to have, but it's unlikely to be a deal-maker. It's certainly not worth paying a premium for. Particuarly when 90 per cent of the time, the colour screen will remain hidden away in a bag or pocket.

When I tested the Vaio Pocket, Sony had not yet made its about-face and agreed to support MP3 natively. That renders my main objection to the VGF-AP1L - that digital audio format should be the choice of the user, not the manufacturer - void. But even the need to transcode MP3 to ATRAC 3 Plus proved less of a chore, and less of a kick in the teeth for audio quality, than I had expected.

If you don't own an extensive MP3 collection, none of this should matter: rip your CDs to ATRAC, just as most iPod users are best advised to rip to AAC. Both formats offer higher quality audio at a given bitrate than MP3. Sony's jukebox software, SonicStage, isn't a patch on iTunes or a number of other, similar apps. That may limit the device's appeal to techies, but I suspect most consumers new to the digital music world will be less concerned - they'll just get on and use it. Again, it's not great, but it works.

But despite the quality of the product, there remain much better value hard drive-based music players on the market, from the iPod down. There are smaller, ligher ones and/or more feature-filled offerings. Yes, the colour screen is unique and the VGF-AP1L's exceptional battery life is impressive, but neither are sufficient to lift the Vaio Pocket above the crowd. ®

Sony Vaio Pocket VGF-AP1L
 
Rating 70%
 
Pros — Superb audio quality
— Well-designed and constructed
— Nice colour screen with album cover art support
 
Cons — No native MP3 support (possibly... we'll see)
— Expensive even compared to iPod
— Screen too small to make the photo feature worthwhile
 
Price £250 (20GB VGF-AP1), £350 (40GB VGF-AP1L) both TBC
 
More info The Sony UK site

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