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.

Features
As with Sony's hard drive MP3 players, the Japanese firm did not see fit to include additional functions (radio and recording). Instead, Sony has concentrated on enhancing the user listening experience, including its standard preset equalizers (heavy, pop, jazz, unique) and two user-defined six-band equalizers. We felt that the basic delivery is good enough without resorting to tweaking. However, if adjustments are unavoidable, we suggest fiddling around with the user-defined ones rather than the presets.

	Cradle may be coming soon. Click for larger image

For users with so many songs that once-favorites get forgotten, the A1000 wants to help them relocate those gems. One of these is the Artist Link feature and it works best when you have lots of songs in the A1000. Pressing the Link button while a track is being played will bring up a list of artists and songs with similar music genres. We like the fact that by highlighting artist names in the results, there will be a 10-second intro of each song under the artist's belt. We did, though, encounter some unexpected associations, i.e. Jay Chow and DJ Killian.

Sony also tried to repackage the A1000's shuffle feature under Intelligent Shuffle. There's the My Favorite Shuffle (shuffles the top 100 most played tracks) and the chic sounding Time Machine Shuffle (shuffles tracks according to the year published). It's an interesting effort, but we feel its more fluff than functionality.

	Artist Link button. Click for larger image

For the budding CSI investigator, the A1000 can display what was played on a given day in the calendar year. That's an incredibly "helpful" feature if you have a pesky sister who's always touching your stuff and you need hard evidence to nail her down.

There's also an initial search feature though it's nothing compared to the keyword search ability of the Creative Zen Vision: M. We find adding tracks to a bookmark (playlist) is a simple two click process. Though we could add new playlists from the software, the inability to do the same for the bookmark lists from the player itself dampens our fun a bit.

	The display is seamlessly flush with the body. Click for larger image

Big news. Sony has abandoned the buggy SonicStage software for the Connect player. The new rendition is miles nicer and easier to navigate without much sacrifice in functionality. It's a good music management software with the usual ripping functions and a drag-and-drop interface. Design of the app is clean and the inclusion of the Connect music store tab may be a hint that the Sony online music store could be hitting Asia soon.

Performance
Audio performance was quite top-notch. With our test Etymotic ER-4P MicroPro, the bass on Massive Attack's Angel was solid and tight. We felt, however, that Diana Krall's You Are Getting to be A Habit with Me was not warm enough in the mids.

With 240MB worth of MP3 files on looping playback at medium volume and no equalizers activated, the A1000 lasted only 13 hours 35 minutes, which was a far cry from the NW-HD5's battery life.

It's rare if we mention bundled earphones at all, but the Sony MDR-E0931 earphones are a comfortable affair that delivers the lows with aplomb, though we felt the phones tended to muffle the highs and mids, resulting in slight distortion.

The response of the A1000's hard drive was less than ideal. We experienced varying lag times of 2 to 3 seconds while trying to move from one menu to another.