Sony NW-E005 (2GB)

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Feature
We recommend the NW-E005 as a good MP3 player for an overseas trip. It has a convenient USB jack to double it as a thumb drive, and a quick charge function which gives the NW-E005 3 hours of juice after a 3 minute charge. While its memory size may be limited, it has built-in FM radio to accommodate foreign music stations.

Otherwise, features are limited. There's no voice/FM recording and, despite little niceties like a display rotation feature and equalization controls, it still pales next to MP3 players that offer a more robust feature set. Even the Sony Ericsson W810i Walkman mobile phone provides the bass-enhancing Mega Bass equalizer.

What we don't like about the NW-E005? SonicStage, now in version 3.4. As part of Sony's digital rights management (DRM) suite, only songs transferred via the much-maligned software are playable on the NW-E005. This means song transfers will take that much longer since SonicStage will have to convert them to the OpenMG audio format.

While SonicStage is no longer as clunky as previous versions and has a reduced tendency to freeze up, it still lags behind in one aspect--it doesn't play video. Though the Japanese giant may feel there is no need since it does not have a portable video player yet, the fact remains that most users are already consuming videos on a regular basis. In order to manage both videos and audio, we had to constantly switch between SonicStage and Windows Media player which was an unnecessary hassle.

Performance
This is probably the first Sony we have encountered that has failed to live up to its claimed playback time. Sony promised 28 hours using ATRAC files encoded at 132kbps, but using our metrics of 240MB worth of MP3 files encoded at 128kbps, we garnered only 16 hours 3 minutes which is now pretty much the industry average.

File transfer speed obviously suffered when we tried shifting 240MB of assorted MP3 files with SonicStage (1.62MB per second) compared with direct drag-and-drop (2.6MB per second).

Sonic-wise, the NW-E005 delivered the trebles and mids at a decent enough clip. Diana Krall sounds husky with no visible distortion on the high notes. Bass was roomy even without the Mega Bass feature, but use decent earphones if you must, as the average earphone will not be able to handle the low end of the register.

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