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.

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.