Sony NW-E005 (2GB)

By Edvarcl Heng, CNET Asia
May 22, 2006

When we saw the NW-E005, we knew we had a winner; everyone who saw it thought it was some fancy new thumb drive. That's close enough. The NW-E005 is Sony's latest MP3 player with a built-in USB jack and the Japanese giant has injected its usual cool into what would have been a mundane device.

Design
It's sleek like no thumb drive has ever been. And yes, that includes the supposedly iconic iPod shuffle. But unlike the screen-less shuffle, the NW-E005 has an OLED display hidden beneath its mirror sheen. Turn it on and a monochrome grey display will emerge from beneath the facade. It looks impressive but that's only if you are indoors. Take a walk under the sun and you won't be able to make out a thing on the screen.

At 25g, the NW-E005 is pretty light and small, but miniaturization comes at the expense of screen real estate; the one-line display is too small. We like the fact that hardware controls are limited to just a few simple buttons: Play, skip, mode, volume, and a hold switch. But again, the smallness of the screen can make playback control unwieldy.

Despite living for a few weeks inside our knick knack-laden pocket, the NW-E005 still remains unscarred despite a glossy plastic casing. We like the tactile feedback from all the buttons, but some are so tiny (2-4mm) it's difficult to depress them.

The graphical user interface is pretty simple and organic. Depressing the mode button will call up a main menu of five icons with access to music playback, radio, playlist, settings and a search feature. The last uses ID3 tag browsing and is particularly useful since we found the one-line display to be particularly irritating.

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