Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony Walkman NWZS739FB 16GB Video MP4 FM Tuner with Noise-Cancelling Headphones - Black

This mp4 player could have been really serious competition for the ipod nano and others, if Sony would have just made a few improvements, in fact there are some features missing from this which even my old Creative Zen Micro had which is about 5+ years old.
For instance, very disappointed that the player does not have the ability to create play lists on the player it's self, instead you have to do this on the computer and then sync with the player, and this is a real pain for me! However I must say at this point, that the player does have its own automatic play list generator (sense me), this is supposed to analyze all the tracks and then put them in to different moods/categories but as far as I can see this is a useless gimmick and some of the music that it has put in the same categories couldn't be more different.
Another feature of this player which as far as I can see is no more than a gimmick is the "noise canceling feature",I cannot tell any difference using the supplied "supposed" noise canceling ear phones or my own (which do not have the "noise canceling").
Another annoying thing, there is no function to set a sleep timer so that the player will switch its self off after 30, 60, 90 minutes etc. (I would have thought that this would be pretty standard nowadays!)

On the up side though, the Sony does have really excellent battery life, small and light enough for your shirt pocket, well built, and sound quality seems very good.
Also has a good quality display for playback of video, albeit a little small to sit and watch an hour and a half movie.
I am hoping Sony will release a new firmware which will miraculously solve all these deficiencies (but I won't hold my breath).
I really like the player as far as looks, build quality, sound quality and battery life go, but I do wish I had opted for the competitor instead, due to the features that this simply just does not have.

This Sony is pretty well made, even if some parts were not exactly in their place, when I bought this item. The sound, in MP3, is great, but if you are looking for the BEST portable sound experience, forget the MP3 format (and so, this item, too).

I tested several musical masterpieces in different styles of music and compared them with MP3 and FLAC formats. Believe it or not: there are some noticeable and perfectly audible differences, always in favor of lossless FLAC format, except that the FLAC files' sizes are more important in FLAC format than in MP3 format (think about the maximum capacity for your item).

Then, the only problem is to find out some items, which, unlike Sony, enable this lossless FLAC format.

In conclusion, according to your #1 priority (best sound quality OR other features), you can definitely look at other items... or you can buy this item for its overall performance. Personally, I sent mine back, after only one week and I bought another item that really enables lossless FLAC format. Now, I really enjoy the lossless sound, every day (with great earphones, too).

they say great things come in small packages well this is one of them so easy to use all the right function that anyone could need genre artiste etc and i did not know that they could fit the Royal Albert Hall and it orchestra into such a small box kidding aside the sound factor of this unit is superb it dont matter what you play rock classic country video quailty is sharp clear but the screen is a little on the small side possibility of some strain on the eyes if watching for to long although i bought this player for the music so that dont matter to me so much now as for price in comparison to some of the units on the market ie ipod it is well worth it on the quaility of sound alone why pay more

I'll make this short. An amazing player in terms of sound quality and features. The included headphones are also of a much higher standard than any other player's, though as always could do with replacing.

The only problems I have with the device are that it doesn't support ogg and FLAC (which isn't really a problem for me, but for some people it may be), and by default Windows will use "MTP" drivers, which means Windows Media Player will interfere with your device if you try to drag and drop any files manually, corrupting parts of some ID3 tags and making transfers painful in general.

Fortunately this is not the device's fault, and you can get around it in Vista by going into device manager, selecting the properties for the player, choosing to update driver software, browse my computer for driver software, and let me pick from a list of device drivers for my hardware. From here you'll be able to pick USB Mass Storage Drivers which'll make the drag and drop work properly. I havn't tested this in XP, so I'd advise a bit of research first on how to do this if you want to use the drag and drop functionality.

I own a Sansa View 16gb which I also bought from Amazon. I like it it but got frustrated with sound quality, especially in the car. The Sony does not disappoint and has oodles of features to play with. The only things I miss about the Sansa is the option to play from the 100 most recently added tracks, and the large scale album cover art pictures as you scroll through files. But this is picky - the Sony wins. And great value at £110.