Sony NW-A1000 (6GB)

By Edvarcl Heng
Dec 15, 2005

ItÂ’s sleek. Awfully sleek, Make that sleek with a mouthful of drool. Sony has done it again. The new Walkman is so sexy that it's managed to make the iPod look positively prudish.

Design
We want to shower kudos on Sony for having the guts and the pizzazz to recreate its flagship Walkman. It's tough on all those designers, considering that each new player has to look radically different from each other, i.e. Bean, NW-HD5, Vaio Pocket. In a cutthroat marketplace that is not unlike the mobile phones', pulling up your design socks is tantamount to preventing your toes from getting flattened by the competition. On the flipside, Sony's constantly morphing designs could be saying something else--that the Japanese firm has not yet concocted the magic bullet to take out the iPod.

	The curve may invite scratches. Click for larger image

The 109g NW-A1000 is decidedly stylish and we are not just paying lip service. Sony has borrowed design elements from the flash-based NW-500 series with the OLED screen hidden within a full plastic face plate. The latter, by the way, is so smoothly integrated into the design that it looks like the player was poured into it. However, do note that the raised curvature of the front plastic face plate is a red carpet for fingerprints. We are surprised Sony did not include a carrying pouch.

The A1000 certainly feels substantial with its metallic facade adding a reassuring heft. Along with its curvy form factor, the A1000 feels very good in hand, actually miles better than the rectangle-ish iPod nano.

Navigation and player controls are centered on the lower part of the front face; a quad-directional joypad, an Option button and a Back key. The joypad was a bit too small for our liking and certainly not a joy for fat fingers unless the plumb digit decided to do the pokey with nails. The even tinier Back and Option buttons seem to suggest the designers sacrificed too much to aesthetics, though the saving grace is that tactile feedback is solid enough to make the miniaturization a minor annoyance.

	Comes in four brillant colors too. Click for larger image

The Option button opens up a contextual menu relevant to the active function and it's pretty detailed, with a variety of options like Play Mode, Bookmarks and Ratings, though it's odd that Sony neglected to include equalizer controls. The Back button is pretty self-explanatory: It returns to the previous menu, and by pressing down and holding it will revert to the main menu.

The Hold function is activated via pressing down a metallic key on the unit top. There's also a slide switch for volume control on the side. Sony has also added a glass-like Link button that lights up with squiggly orange lines when pressed. More on what it does later in the Features section.

Interestingly, Sony has abandoned the gimmicky screen orientation mode found in the NW-HD5. We don't miss it. Taking a leaf out of its mobile phone division book, the main menu for the A1000 uses an icon-based GUI. It's easy enough to understand and one that is unlikely to get bogged down by Creative's patent.

	Big brother A3000 with its sibling. Click for larger image

The OLED is plenty bright… indoors. Once sunshine comes into the picture, it will be a miracle if you can detect even a pixel. Sony has also decided to stick to a proprietary cable for Connectivity, so it will be something extra to carry around if your music collection is located in two different computers.

The battery is removable on this player, though we would suggest bringing it down to the service center to get it swapped; we had a helluva time trying to open up the back plate with a pair of tweezers and the user manual didn't turn out to be too helpful, either.

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