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29th Jan 2013

Sony Walkman NWZ-F805

It's been a bit of a while since we last had a Walkman, but we've obviously been missing out after getting our hands on the NWZ-F805

JOE

It’s been a bit of a while since we last had a Walkman, but we’ve obviously been missing out after getting our hands on the swanky new NWZ-F805

By Adrian Collins

JOE took on the NWZ-F805 for a test-drive recently, and we have to say we were impressed. We’ve been using our phone as our mp3 recently, as we imagine most of you guys out there have, but this particular model gave us a real aural treat in comparison.

The sound quality was a far sight clearer, and it also offered better quality at higher volumes for noisy environments like the bus or the gym, pretty impressive for a compact unit.

This Walkman is also an Android device, which is great news because we can get access to our favourite apps and use them over wifi. So if you do a lot of internet radio streaming, listening to brilliant podcasts like The Hard Yards or use something like 8tracks, it’s a great option to be able to use the Play Store.

The screen is also decent for watching video, and would be handy on a long journey. That said, it’s probably too small a if you were going to be watching a lot of shows on your daily commute – so it won’t be replacing the tablet in your life.

Where it really excelled was on our playlist in the gym; the small size made it easy to slip into most conventional gym arm bands, and the sound quality, even when pushed up to a volume that we needed to get it to to drown out the terrible music they pump in, was top notch.

You also have a range of options to twiddle with every possible sound setting, including a dynamic normaliser and some serious bass boost, which we didn’t expect on a device like this. These were the options that really made it stand out, giving us a serious improvement in sound quality from what we’ve been used to, no matter the headphones.

One of our favourite features was the visualisation app that had models of the old classic Sony Walkmans that we remember from our childhoods (we are getting OLD). When you hit play on the model, it started up on the player and also had a nice visualisation of a tape playing. Small touch, but it made us smile anyway.

One of the few points which make it a bit more difficult to use is the headphone chord being on the bottom of the device, which can restrict your movement a little if you have sports headphones with a short wire.

When we took it out jogging, it was something that did get on our nerves, but that’s a headphones issue too, so we can’t be too harsh on that front.

The lack of an option for expandable memory is also a slight drawback. At 16gb, it’s got a fair whack of internal storage anyway, but we still like the option of being able to switch cards or to add from our extensive music collection, since we’re such musos here at JOE.

Also, the interface in the library is pretty good, but it’s difficult to figure out how to do playlists, which might seem a small thing but doesn’t make life any easier. We just set it on shuffle for the tracks we added, but if you wanted to do a playlist you might need to transfer it from your PC.

The other issue is the price. At €249 on the Sony site, this is a pretty steep price tag for an mp3. That said, if you take your sound quality seriously or you think your current device isn’t hacking it as a music player, it’s worth a punt if you’ve got that chunk of change lying around. We certainly haven’t objected to listening to it these past few days anyway!

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