Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony 4 GB Walkman Video MP3 Player with FM Tuner (Red)

I researched a lot before buying this product. I found good reviews but very few people have bought the product. But I was not disappointed after buying this product. The sound quality is great and noise cancellation feature is great as well. I like the software its as simple as dropping the files in the folder.

While listening to songs I could hear many new sounds in the song which i did not know existed

Overall, a great music player, the best of 5 I've owned (2 ipods, cowon D2, iriver clix). The battery life is unbelievable, the video is really good, the noise cancellation is just fantastic, and the sound is excellent. The UI is very easy and intuitive to use, but with a limited feature set. From a usability perspective, there are three flaws
1) The headphone jack has a ridge on it that prevents you from using it on any other device. So you need a separate set of headphones to listen to music on your computer, or on the exercise machine at the gym
2) You can't make or edit playlists on the fly, you have to create them on the computer, which is cumbersome. And you have to use something like Windows Media player, which, like the itunes interface, I really dislike. I much prefer the drag and drop approach that the Cowon or the iRivers take.
3) I have my entire music library on the walkman, and haven't figured out how to rearrange the existing songs into playlists. The only way I know to make playlists is to copy the songs into the playlist, so if a song is on multiple playlists, there are multiple copies on the mp3 player
If you can live with these issues, this is a terrific music player. I'm torn between the flexibility on my iriver clix and the sound quality on the Sony, but the battery life and noise cancellation makes the Sony superior. The Cowon probably comes closest, but the noise cancellation and sleeker form factors gives the win to the Sony. The ipods were markedly inferior and I gave them away, not worth mentioning them here.

I found myself in need of a new mp3 player when my old ipod kept crashing my computer (Vista) so I went with the Sony. I am so much happier with this product than I was with the IPod. The software for uploading music is very user-friendly. I buy tunes from several sites now, most notably Rhapsody, and upload them in seconds from the music manager to the player (no need to create folders or playlists). The MP3 player is also very user-friendly, as was the IPod. And the sound is excellent. The noise cancelling headphones actually do as advertised, which I discovered on a long car trip with my arguing children. I was able to ignore them almost completely. Battery life is very good, but goes down considerably when using the noise cancelling feature. That's really my only knock.

Sony NWZS616FBLK 4GB Walkman Video MP3 Player (Black)
I own six Apple iPods, but not a one of them will play WMV audio books I can download free from my public library, and not of them have a built in FM tuner. This Walkman has it all, plus a sound deadening feature that is very helpful when using the Walkman at the fitness center! The sound quality is great and the battery life is very long. It is a great bargain for the price!

I've been using this player for a month and just love it so far. I've gotten numerous compliments on the player at work and it's always funny when I tell people it's a Walkman since most remember the old cassette tape players and didn't realize there was a mp3 player version. I work in a warehouse handling boxes so I also bought the armband to go with the player and couldn't be any happier thus far.

The Good:

Sound quality: As mentioned before I work in a warehouse that is also very loud and the sound quality is amazing. Even more impressive is that I only use 1 of the earphones since I need one ear free to hear fellow employees.

Features: I primarily use the "shuffle all" option of the mp3 player at work but it also comes with a time machine shuffle, a radio that you can preset your favorite radio stations, picture viewer, and video player. The video player is something I've used a couple times when viewing videos from YouTube. There are numerous programs that can convert the .flv YouTube files to mpeg4 but I use a free one called Any Video Converter that works just fine.

Battery Life: No issues here. I'll add songs here and there to the player and by the time I'm done messing around the player is fully charged.

Song Information: While a song is playing you can see the song title, album art, artist, album name, genre, and year ... assuming you have that information tagged to the file. For if some reason you don't have album art or song information tagged you can use a free program like mp3tag that will allow you to add whatever you need. Pictures of most album covers can be found on wikipedia or amazon.


The Bad:
Honestly there isn't really anything to put here except two things:

Drag and Drop functionality: The easiest way to get mp3 files on the player is to drag the file from where it is saved on the computer and drop it in the music folder of the Walkman which works just fine, however, for whatever reason the year for the song will say "unknown" if done this way. This can be corrected by using a program like Media Jukebox that will sync your files to the Walkman and is actually pretty easy to do. You can even use Windows Media Player 11 to sync but I found Media Jukebox to be the easiest.

Button size: The main pause/play button is a good size but the navigation buttons around it are a bit small ... or maybe I just have enormous hands. :D

Hope this review helps someone.