Some of us can remember the original Sony Walkman – a revolution in it’s day but the world has moved on since then and Sony were slow to jump on the MP3 bandwagon, letting a certain Cupertino based company steal the show.

The “Walkman” brand has been used on various devices since then (most commonly phones) but the new X series marks Sony’s most recent attempt to get back into the portable music player business. Read on to see what we think…

Specifications

• Dimensions (W x H x D):Approx. 52.5 x 97.4 x 10.5 mm
• Weight: Approx. 98g
• Audio Formats: MP3, WMA, MP4, 3GP, WAV
• Video Formats: H.264, MPEG-4,
• Wifi Security: WEP/WPA/WPA2
• Built in FM radio

Construction

The first thing that hits you when you power the X series on is how bright and punchy the screen is. It’s a 3” capacitive OLED touch screen with 430×240 resolution that looks sharp and incredibly vivid.

The casing has a textured, slightly marbled effect that will hide scratches well and the screen is quite sensitive. It is a fingerprint magnet though – I suggest keeping a cleaning cloth handy!

The X series is a flash based player (so no hard drives to worry about) and it’s available in 16GB and 32GB capacities.

Software

There’s good and bad news to report here. I only had a Windows 7 PC available to test the Walkman with and the installer for the PC software crashed every time I tried to run it. Because of that I can’t report on the quality of the supplied applications as I never got a chance to run them.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Windows 7 picked up the Walkman, identified it, found drivers from who knows where and showed it as a device in Windows media player. All very painless – a pleasant change.

Another plus is that it shows as a hard drive in windows explorer so you get a choice of management styles – you can drag and drop MP3’s straight onto the device if you want to, or you can use Windows media player to set up playlists and manage cover art etc.

Usability

Sony get major bonus points for shipping good earbuds with the X series. They’re comfortable to wear and give a very good sound. It’s always problematic describing sound quality as everybody has different expectations so the best thing I can say is that the standard Apple buds made me want to go out and replace them immediately, whereas I can listen to the Sony ones happily.

Another nice feature is noise cancelling. The supplied buds provide a fair bit of isolation, but the walkman can also apply noise cancelling on top of that to silence those annoying co-workers / bus passengers.

It’s not all gravy though – noise cancelling only works with the supplied headphones. Replace them with standard ones and the feature disables itself.

[Edit – Sony have supplied some more information on the noise cancelling – click on the image to expand…]

The touch screen UI works well and is intuitive enough that I didn’t need to resort to the manual during the testing period. Everything fades and glides smoothly in and out making for a very fluid experience.

The sound quality of the walkman is generally very good. You get a lot of control over sound with a programmable equaliser and various enhancing / processing options designed to reverse the worst effects of MP3 compression. It seems to like the supplied headphones better than my beats – I got some odd hissing / interference with the beats at times but with the supplied headphones it was fine.

[Edit – That may not be fair; I think my beats were on the way out anyway and I’ve recently replaced them]

There’s an FM radio (remember those?) built in, accessed by a button on the home screen. What more to say – it works, although it would have been nice to see RDS; having gotten used to that in the car I’ve pretty much forgotten any radio frequencies I knew…

Internet

The X series has Wifi built in, allowing it to connect to the internet. You get a web browser which works well enough as long as you have bookmarks but entering any URLs is a pain on the touch screen – combine that with the limited resolution and I couldn’t see myself using it much.

One unexpected feature is the YouTube link – the UI has an option to search for “related links” on any given song. This will give you other similar tracks in your library and a big “You Tube” button. Following the YouTube link connects you to the net and lets you stream related music videos. It’s a nice touch and works quite well.

Conclusion

The obvious and somewhat inevitable comparison is to the iPod touch but I’m not sure that’s fair. Sony have no app store (or dedicated and loyal fanbase) to expand the functionality of the device and on that basis alone the touch will always win out.

That said, the X series acquits itself very nicely as a music player – it sounds great and is up there with the best of them in terms of style and UI. If you must have an Apple comparison it’s probably fairer to compare it to an iPod Nano: size wise the Sony sits between the Nano and Touch and offers a good range of music features with some additional connectivity and a slick touch screen interface.

If you’re interested in a decent music player and not too worried about the fart app, you should take a look at the X series. It’s available at Amazon from £175.