PCAdvisor Reviews NW-A3000
Whilst there are numerous NW-A3000 reviews on the Internet, Rosemary Haworth’s words seem to be a genuine expression of the current experience associated with the new Walkman. Far too often there will be cookie-cutter reviews that seemingly are nothing more than a rehash of the product specifications, biased unrelated commentary and overall little value.
Sony NW-A3000
It’d be a slight overstatement to say there was a round of applause when we heard that Sony was going to break the habit of a lifetime and start selling music players that were capable of playing MP3s. But it was certainly greeted as a welcome volte-face.
Yes, the company that has made a virtue of its contrariness when it comes to compatibility has finally seen the sense in adopting the format that everyone else uses and that even Apple – the company with the catchline Think Different – has supported ever since its first iPod.
The first thing we noticed about the NW-A3000 is that Sony seems to be going after the girls. This player and its smaller 6GB sibling are available in purple, baby blue and silver – although manly black is on the menu too. Only when you tap one of the Sony’s buttons does the rather clunky menu appear through the ‘futuristic’ (according to the press materials) coating. This is a device with a look all of its own – and it works for us.
Wait watchers
Sony warns that installing the necessary software for the player takes around 30 minutes, and we certainly had more than enough time for a cup of tea while it did its stuff. More delays occurred when we started using the device – when you click on the NW-A3000’s desktop icon it sets off to hunt down all the tracks already stored on your hard disk and imports them into its library.
As well as ripping tunes from your CD collection or importing them from an existing library, tracks can be downloaded from Sony’s Connect Music Store for 99p a pop and, to get you started, Sony offers a free album when you register your player. Once you’ve got some tunes on your player, you can listen to and manage your music collection using the SonicStage software Sony supplies. This offers in-depth details of your tracks and plenty of control over their playback settings.
The good news is that once you’ve finally got tracks on the NW-A3000, you’ll find the audio quality rather impressive. We compared playback on this and a couple of other MP3 players and found the Sony superior. That said, the supplied headphones are nothing to write home about and the device’s cord is ridiculously short. Thankfully, we had a jacket with a breast pocket, but most people will surely want the option of carrying it in their pocket, backpack or handbag.
Limited options
The Sony’s menu is nowhere near as user-friendly or sleek as those on other players we’ve seen – no intuitive touchscreens or fast track locator here. You can drill down to find pretty detailed track information, sort by various criteria or get the Sony to shuffle tracks ‘intelligently’, but there’s little on offer that other players lack.
More worryingly, the Hold button works only when the player is in use and the NW-A3000 was rather prone to switching itself on and draining the battery. To power off, you have to go through several menus. However, we liked the cunning way Sony has kept the cabling to a minimum by using a USB connector for plugging into both the PC and the power pack. With hard disk-based players such as this one, charging up straight from the PC via a USB port simply isn’t possible, so full marks to Sony for making one USB port do double duty.
Sony claims a capacity of 13,000 songs and a battery life of up to 35 hours.
To MP3 or not to MP3?
As the MP3 file format has grown increasingly ubiquitous, Sony has resolutely stuck to its own proprietary compression technology, Atrac, on all of its digital music devices. With sales below target expectations, Sony’s move to MP3 support seems to be a reluctant necessity.
But MP3 support on the NW-A3000 is not what it seems and is bound to frustrate many a user. Tracks you drag from the library to the player icon in the software interface take ages to copy across, not least because unless you change the preferences, your music library gets transcoded. File format settings can only be swapped between Atrac3 and Atrac3plus, with no option to retain and play files in their original MP3 format. What’s more, the NW-A3000 managed to suck up almost all our test PC’s resources while it was busy transcoding, so we weren’t able to crack on with other tasks while waiting for the player to be filled with joyful sounds to savour on the commute home.
Verdict
Its looks are striking and listening to tunes on it really is a joy, but the NW-A3000 is heavy and lacks the user-friendly access to tracks found on its rivals. And despite claiming to be an MP3 player, in reality it’s a clunky Atrac player that can recognise other formats.
I find strange how people can complain about the menu in this player. Granted, I haven’t actually used it, but knowing the previous Walkmans and having read the manual, I can’t see what’s complicated about it. It seems better thought to me than the iPod’s (yes, I don’t like the iPod’s menu, find it too song oriented, and I’m album oriented). What worries me with these comments is that more and more we’ll see over-simplified menus that will just mimick the iPod’s.
The review says that MP3s are transcoded. They are not. The player is indeed playing the MP3 files.
I picked one of these up in Japan along with many of the accessories Sony has made avaialble for it (far more accessories than I have seen available in Europe for the device, some wonderful leather cases for instance.)
If you are a previous owner of any of Sony’s better Minidisc units this player is compatible with the remote controls for those units, and there’s a small, basic remote available for the unit besides.
A significant difference between the reviewer’s experience and mine is that the hold button does indeed work when the unit is powered down, so long as it is set before power down. Simply hit “stop” on the remote and in 15 seconds the unit shuts down, maintaining HOLD on the unit itself (Sony remotes all have a separate HOLD switch as well)
I agree with the review on certain points. The included phones are rubbish. I own various Etymotic and Shure canal phones so this is no problem for me. The mass weight does seem a bit hefty.
The Sony 3000 really trounces Ipod products in the battery life department. I got 32 hours use on recent flights before giving in to the blinking battery icon and recharging- it never did shut down in that time. This was with a majority of music coded as MP3, at a volume level of about 18 (with Shure canal phones) and the display set to automatic. Not surprising from a compoany which produces a flash based unit that really does last 50 houurs on a charge (A series).
I find the menu is easy to use and intuitive- if you can run a Nokia cell phone, you can run the features in this unit.
Since I live in the USA I am using Sonic Stage 3.0, and again no problems (except no functionality for some features such as Artist Link and Intelligent Shuffle). The Sonic Stage software will only transcode MP3 to ATRAC if you tell it to. I have heard horror stories about the CONNECT player software but Sony is working on this. Using Sonic Stage I loaded 16 gb of music in MP3 and various ATRAC formats in a few minutes, no slower than if transferring the files themselves to a portable hard drive through a USB 2.0 connector.
For general use I still like my 2 GB A608 (with a really incredible 50 hour battery life) but for long trips where one might wasnt to carry a good deal more music, this A-3000 is wonderful.
The only negative points I see is my U.S. friends are green with envy - the display is pretty much useless in direct sunlight- and being a drive based player, I’m very careful not to drop it (though it does have a freefall detector which parks the head in case of such an occurance).
does anyone know if it can support any other asian languages besides japanese?
and also the release date in US?
sorry i’ve been waiting for this for the longest time.. i am getting pretty impatient and i can’t find much info about it.
Yes, the A series does support Traditional/Simplified Chinese and Korean.
Well I agree with this review,
I have received a na-w1000
And the menu’s really sucks, I used to have a ipod and scroll wheel is way better than pressing 25 times the down or up button. Plus funny fact : it takes more time to go back than forward, meaning in the menus if you are playing a song and press back to go to the album list, it takes actually longer (2~3seconds) than if you press menu to go back to root directory and then album… (less than 1 sec).
2 3 second doesn’t seem much, but it is not user friendly (imagine pushing windowsxp start button and waiting 2 3 seconds before it pop up)
Connect player sucks so bad, sony is actually advising his customers to use the old sonicstage (altough not every feature is available with the NA-series)…
this tells you how much it connect player is baaaaaad
As stated it’s not an mp3 player, it’s an atrac player. The mp3’s header are removed and replaced by a sony header -> it’s not full transcode it’s only header transcode. So it WILL take ages to transfert mp3.
well the player is cute, but not usable in sun light (to much reflection you can see a damn thing), very heavy, and round -> it’s like having a flat stone in your pocket…
So if you are wearing suit’s it is not the player you want to buy
sony… never again
I received the nw-a1000 for Christmas and spent countless hours messing around with the Sony Connect software (horrible). Ultimately I gave up and reverted back to Sonic Stage at the expense of some minor features (I CAN wait for Sony to update it). As for it not playing Mp3’s in it’s native format.. who cares? It is a hard drive player.. you can load videos, music (mp3, wav, midi, ect), photos, games and other files and transfer them to your friends computer… no problem… stop whining (winging). I am an American in Britain and I have used this player for months.. it is far better than an ipod and looks better to. Once the software is worked out the brain dead ipod lovers will line up to get one. I am proud to say I didn’t line up like a mindless zombie to pick up an ipod i saw someone else with ont he train. With that being said.. Britain was a testing ground for the new walkman.. once released in the US it will have no problems. Watch as Apple’s share in the hard drive based music player market falls… ha ha ha.
It’s not complex, but then it’s not exactly brilliant either. The sound quality more than makes up for that though, being really rather nice - once you’ve plugged in some decent earphones.
My own experience has been that SonicStage is OK as a tool for transferring music to the device, but isn’t even nearly as nice as iTunes or even WMP as a general music player. Some sort of pod-catcher feature would be a nice addition, aswell as a general clean-up of the interface. If they made it *look* as nice as the Connect Player it’d be a nice step forward.
Speaking of the Connect player… I’d say don’t bother unless you’ve managed to get XP running on the latest supercomputer. It’s the slowest thing ever created. Even RealPlayer is better. No, really.
I got my NWA-1000 in January… and I really like it. I use Sonic Stage 3.3 so I have no problems with software. It doesn’t take me ages to transfer mp3s (all my songs are in mp3 mode, except for cds which are in atrac). It takes mere seconds. I know a lot of people who work for Sony who also really like this product and have one for their own personal use. (And no, they do not like EVERY Sony gatchet because they work for them) I personally do not find the software problems an issue.. because I wouldn’t use half the options (artist link, seaching.. etc) anyway. While I do think that it takes a while to search through songs (as in, it takes a while for the menus to load), it’s a hard drive.. what do you expect? I think is ultimately is a personal preference when liking this player.
Seeing everyone complain about its weight is very strange. Its not as if its a brick, unless all the people who have complained have abnormally low muscle power. Connect software is dire, but sonic stage makes up for it, with it being super fast and not having to convert any formats. It took less than an hour for me to transfer 3000 tracks at 128kbps mp3 format, although it does transcode and rename all files, so it is impossible to retrieve any tracks without having the tracks stored in your library or the connect software. This is the first piece of sony hardware i have had the pleasure of purchasing, and I am more than pleased. My only niggle (problem, not a racist comment) is that it is strangely quiet, I am usually listening to it at 27 with the bundled headphones.
In general the Ipod cannot compare, especially on the battery life and reliability front (my ipod crashed 6 times during my ownership, sold it to an unsuspecting individual).
Having got this as a birthday present yesterday, I have been subjected to one of the most frustrating evenings of my life!
The player itself seems fine (sounds good), the problem is this confounded software.
The first thing I don’t understand is why this connect/sonic stage software has to take up so much resource on my PC.
There is this image tinyhttp.exe (tiny? pah!) that manages to have a mem usage of over 200,000K and CPU of 100% whilst running Connect. What it does, I don’t know. The only way I could get Connect itself to appear was to set the priority of this process to low (and even then it was still caning the CPU). Even Sonic stage had this Omgjbox.exe taking up 50,000K and 100% CPU (omg = oh my God!). I gave up on that and went back to connect.
The second thing I don’t understand is why I can’t drag and drop MP3s directly onto the player and play them. I have about 100GB of MP3s (all in alphabetic sub directories sorted by artist and then by album), and this conversion process is very painful.
I left it running overnight, and only half the tracks are ready. Given that all it is doing is changing the headers, can’t a simple conversion utilty suffice, one that doesn’t connect to the www and uses the existing headers.
I don’t understand how a 20GB MP3 player can be sold where it is more or less impossible to load a significant number of tracks on. I have about 20 tracks on at present (my clio with a 128MB memory stick has more). What do Sony expect? Me to buy tracks from Connect and fill it up that way!
Another problem with the software is that with 30,000 tracks, selecting them and moving them is arduous. The directory structure is not preserved, so you have to go through a list of 30,000 files to find the ones you want to transfer.
Also why is it advertised as a 20GB player? Connect is showing just 18GB. That’s 10% less than expected!
I wish I’d got the 30GB video iPod…… (sigh!)
I received my A3000 as a gift from Sony (they messed up service on my Vaio). I would not have bought it otherwise as I knew about the software problems, and I wouldn’t have bought an iPod either (I don’t like following everyone else like a sheep, and I don’t like the wheel control - not easy to adjust volume in your pocket etc). I would have bought the player when the software was improved, as the sound quality (good with supplied ‘phones, brilliant with Sennheisers, and in my view, the styling is superb.
I tried all the software options, SonicStage 3.3 and 3.4 after initial problems with connect, but the latest (feb 06) Connect update does make it useable, albeit slowly. I am happy to persevere and wait for a hopefully much improved version (Sony have recruited a top ITunes bod).
On the volume front, it is quiet, there is a volume limit on European models to protect us from ourselves, but this is easily removed with the hack on Atraclife.
The menus are fine in my view, logical and straightforward, though admitedly not the quickest. The hold button is fine once one realises that you set it whilst powered up, and the player powers itself down after 30 seconds on pause.
For me the screen is highly visible in most lighting conditions (I believe brightness is adjustable, having one of the darker coloures cases may help - eg, purple or black, versus silver).
Battery life is excellent, with average to heavy use (several hours a day) it will still go 3 or 4+ days without a recharge, so it isn’t necessarily a daily ritual unlike many iPod users find.
I am using a RM-MC35ELK which I picked up for £10 on ebay, which is far more functional than the iPod remote (or the basic A3000 one).
The few emails I have sent to Sony and Connect Europe support have been answered quickly and appropiately.
All in all, I am very satisfied with the player and its potential once Connect is sorted. When it is, it will truly be an iPod killer. Battery life and sound quality combined make this the best player for me. Obviously my satisfaction is helped by the price I paid (£0).
CONNECT Player aside (just don’t get me started!), my only gripe with my A3000 is that it’s not an MP3/WMA player, but a player of MP3/WMA files converted into a strange Sony format that nothing else understands. Catchy name, eh?
The fact that you can sync the device with WMP (for example) but not play the files that you sync is totally loolah, and a hamfisted attempt to replicate Apple’s reliance on the iTunes file format that no other software can use.
Sony should make it much clearer that the device *will not work with your favourite media player software* instead of waiting till you get it home to find out. Either that or develop some sort of plugins for the more common players.
That aside, I love it. It looks good; it’s not overly heavy; the sound is great.
I have owned an A3000 for a month or so now, and I have to say, I am very pleased. The Sony updated Connect works fine. Yes, it is a little slow, but as long as you do not rush it, it performs exactly how it is supposed to do. The above review is incorrect in its assessment that this player does not play MP3 or WMA formats. Sony have released software and firmware updates that allow both to be transfered to the player quickly and easily (much quicker than when all your WMAs were being converted to .oma format).
I find the comments about the menu screen a little odd. This menu is one of the nicest I have ever come across (Ipod included). The screen uses nice icons and is more than easy to navigate. You do not have a trawl through lots of screens and menus to turn off, as Sony cleverly made the ‘option’ and ‘back’ buttons smart buttons. Hold down the ‘option’ button, and the player switches off. Hod down the ‘back’ button and you get taken straight to the main menu. Fantastic little extras.
I have over 1500 tracks on it at the moment, and have plenty more space to fill. The battery life is as good as Sony stated (over 30 hours, at least). The sound quality is excellent, even with the bog-standard earphones supplied with the player. All in all, I love it (I own the purple 20G version).
wow 8mb me want