Sony NWZ-X1050 (16GB)

Performance

The MP3 playback was very decent given Sony's pedigree in making portable audio devices. However, we did notice some noise when we plugged in more sensitive in-ear headphones. The X1050 also offers audio tuning options such as a five-band user-customizable equalizer, VPT surround, DSEE sound enhancer, Clear Stereo, and Dynamic Normalizer.


The included in-ear-style headphones block out a fair bit of external noise and the player does the rest, reducing ambient sounds. However, the headphone's performance isn't stellar, coming across as dull, drab, but bassy. Another downside is that the noise-canceling feature works only with the provided in-ear headphones. That said, the noise-canceling feature works rather well, even if you're not playing music through the player.

Internet browsing on the player's built-in Wi-Fi and NetFront Browser is quick and easy to navigate. Full-sized Web pages do overwhelm the player and the browsing turns extremely sluggish, sometimes ending up with a message to warn the user that resources have been used up.

However, we couldn't understand why pages that require Flash to be installed reported that the browser was incompatible, especially when the X1050 also includes the YouTube client which is a flash-based video playback platform.

The YouTube client, on the other hand, is excellent. It feels fast even when scrolling through the list of videos. You can browse through Featured, Most Viewed, Keyword Search and Related Videos. Unfortunately, getting to the video is what we think is the worst part of the player.

To search for videos, we needed to punch in keywords into the search engine. The keypad-style onscreen keyboard features a different kind of predictive text input (that will only predict letters you have typed in, and not the more commonly used T9 which operates on the sequence of key presses). It was a pain getting anything typed in, partially due to its sluggishness and partially due to the inability to select multiple characters.

We particularly hated it when we had to delete long lines of letters (e.g. long URLS), and we ended up most of the time going to a blank page to start afresh. Another gripe we had was that the browser does not add "http://" to the front of any url; you'll have to do it yourself.

Conclusion

We're not sure just how much we like this Sony NWZ-X1050. It looks interesting, has loads of features, yet we were left frustrated at punching in simple keywords into the player. Audio and video performance are very good, the screen is brilliant, but paying for the extra Wi-Fi feature doesn't seem quite right as the set does not seem capable of full-on Internet browsing partly due to its small screen size and sluggish built-in browser. But if you're a touchscreen fan with adoration for all things Sony, then glitches aside, this Walkman might just hit the spot.

Tags: Screen, Sony Walkman, Sony Corp., touch screen, Windows Media

• Most Popular

• Upcoming

What's Hot