By Kelvin Low, CNET Asia
08/06/2009
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/musicplay/0,39050463,44606925p,00.htm

Sony’s X-Series Walkman looks impressive on paper. An OLED screen, active noise canceling, Wi-Fi and integrated Web browser are just some of the main features. This is also the first standalone MP3 player in Sony's Walkman range to feature touchscreen navigation capability.

The X-Series comes in 16GB (X1050) and 32GB versions (X1060), with memory capacity the only difference between these two players.

Design

Unlike the posh look of the iPod touch, Sony has opted for a more unconventional look in a sparkling black granite hue on both the front and back surfaces. The sides of the unit have a rough "stone-ish" texture, presumably for your hands to get a firm grip on it.

At 97 x 52 x 10mm, it fits comfortably in the hand. Sony has decided to include physical buttons for Reverse, Forward, and Play/Pause. These buttons reside at the top of the set. On the right side of the Walkman are a volume control rocker switch and a slider switch to activate or deactivate the noise-canceling feature.

The Hold button is located on the rear, and can be set to disable all user inputs on the controls, or to deactivate the touchscreen. The front of the set is home to a 3-inch OLED screen and the Home button which also doubles as a power switch.

Features

The WQVGA screen offers a 432 x 240-pixel resolution. We were very impressed by the color reproduction of the photos and videos. The screen was even readable in direct sunlight. Text appeared sharp and videos lacked any ghosting effects. We wished Sony had given it a larger screen, which would have upped the enjoyment level by another notch.

The touchscreen is of the capacitive variant. It works on the principle of the human body being an electrical conductor. Touching the surface of the screen changes the electric field within the player. However, this means that it will not respond to touches from covered fingers or a pen stylus. The screen is generally responsive and scrolling through album art proved very smooth.

The interface has several elements borrowed from the Sony Ericsson range of phones, which is good if you're familiar with that interface, but it was generally easy to adapt to. Browsing the music library was a breeze, especially through album view where we spent most of the time flicking through the album art. After loading the player with songs, we found that going through a long song list was remarkably easy since you can browse through albums, songs and artists in alphabetical order.

The device only allows MTP USB connections with Windows-based PCs (However, if you have Windows Media Player 11 installed, it allows for easier drag-and-drop file transfer. If you prefer, Sony also bundles the Media Manager for Walkman software, which was a pretty decent performer. The unit also offers a tree directory navigation, which is nice. Hook it up to a Mac, or a PC running a non-Windows OS and it goes into UMS mode. The X1050's battery is unfortunately built-in. It took about 3 hours to fully charge via USB. We managed 31 hours of audio playback time and about 6 hours with video, not far from Sony's claim of 33 hours for audio and 7.5 hours with video. It will play MP3, AAC-LC, WAV and WMA formats and also supports MPEG-4, AVC and WMV video.

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.