It's quirky. It's cute. It reminded us of the Digital Dream Kids campaign that Sony tried to push out in the late 1990s. Who could imagine anyone but Sony to have the creative gall to fashion an MP3 player after a bean? Perhaps the Japanese firm was hoping that a giant beanstalk would overshadow a certain apple tree? Think about it, what pops out of a pod when it ripens?

Design
Yup, that's right, it's beans. There's a bit of haiku poetry on the part of Sony's designers, we think. Possibly targeted at the iPod shuffle as well as the rest of the competition inspired by the faceless wonder, the Sony Walkman Bean NW-E307 has the curves as well as the slight nip in the middle characteristic of kidney beans. It certainly says a lot for design. We can imagine an architecture student munching, erm… sorry, hanging onto this. The Bean sits well on the index and middle finger, providing easy thumb access to the controls. The plus point is that it doesn't matter whether you are left- or right-handed or both.

	Bean Click for larger image

However, it's just too bad that the unwieldy nature of the joypad mars the aesthetics of this legume. Initially promising with good tactile feedback, we fault the Bean for constantly failing to register presses on the left side of the joypad. That's a crucial flaw since it governs the function for decreasing volume. We found that it is the awkward positioning of the joypad which, because of the odd angle, leaves little maneuvering space and seems to make the little kidney brain believe we are pressing its center button instead.

We once mentioned that we loved the USB jack implementation on the Samsung YP-U1. Well, our fickle-minded affection is now fixated on the Sony NW-E307's snap-blade USB jack. By withdrawing the slider cover, it pops out with a fluid ease that borders on the wicked. Our only gripe with the slider is that the fluidity extends to the slider cover as well, and since the position of the cover also determines whether the player is on Hold, it is easy to change the Hold status by accident.

The single-line OLED display is clear and bright though it isn't exactly intuitive when it comes to navigation for those used to larger displays.

Features
When it comes to features, the Bean ain't much to write home about. Let's start with the pluses. FM reception is very good. The NW-E307's FM auto search function scored every station within the spectrum and some other faint stations we have never heard of.

Similar to the new generation of Sony MP3 players, the Bean has a quick recharge function which gives 3 hours worth of juice after a 3-minute peck from the computer. That's extremely useful for consummate portable music consumers.

Although the Bean supports the major audio codecs MP3, WMA, WAV as well as Sony's own ATRAC format, the Bean makes transfers difficult by insisting that it is mandatory to use the SonicStage software. The funny thing is, despite the years that Sony has to improve the software, SonicStage still manages to maintain a transfer speed that can be described as dawdling at best. (See Performance section).

Unlike similarly configured MP3 players from Taiwan and China, there's no recording option on this Bean. However there are niceties like screen savers and the standard AVLS feature which helps to put a cap on the NW-E307's loudness. For playlists, it has to be set by the user from the SonicStage software. There's no option to do it from the unit.

Performance
We detected a slight hiss during quieter moments in our test tracks, but unless the listener has particularly keen hearing, it is not especially obvious. Other than the hiss, we find the Bean to be plenty loud when we cranked up the volume. The highs and mids are relatively well-rounded and, though we felt the low end to be rather lackluster, turning on the sound mode made the bass a lot more robust.

Transfer speed via the SonicStage software was a turtle-like 0.55MB per second. This reviewer managed to fit in a visit to the loo and the coffee machine before the transfer was completed.

Battery life has traditionally been a trump card for Sony units; the Bean lives up to its predecessor's reputation with a playtime of 46 hours 52 minutes.