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| Photo courtesy of the Sony Store website. |
Price
P4999 from SM Appliance Store, SM North The Block.
The Package (and some rant)
The package comes with the following: user manuals and warranty form, 4 pairs of earbuds, the headset and the charging dock. Yep, a proprietary charging dock, which means that you're doomed if it breaks and you're out of warranty. Also, you would need to have a laptop with you to charge the device. I have USB chargers that I can probably bring when I'm travelling, but I fear that the voltage may be too high (as opposed to that of a laptop USB port) that I might damage the player. Oh well.
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| Me wearing the thing. This already makes me a model, right? Look at the curvature of my face at this angle. How many strands of white hair can you count? Oh wait, enough about me. Haha. |
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| The thing attached to the charging dock. |
Operating the Device
The controls were intuitively arranged that I familiarized myself with the location of the buttons immediately. To turn the device on just press and hold the power button. If you're not wearing it, you should see the LED light on the right earpiece blink. If you're wearing it on, you should hear a beep and a voice prompt telling you if you're on shuffle or playlist.
Note that none of the copious multi-lingual manuals that came with the package tell how to create a playlist. Well here's how. Connect the device on your computer. Open Windows Media Player and then the Sync tab. Open your playlists on the left panel, drag and drop your desired playlists on the Sync tab. You can walk your dog or prepare a meal while waiting for the syncing to be completed (took me about 10 minutes). Pressing and holding the playlist button (also the shuffle button) allows you to toggle between playing a playlist or all songs. You can change playlists by pressing and holding the forward and backward buttons.
Upon first plug in, the driver is automatically installed. The convenient window (first picture below) opens - the procedure for creating and choosing playlist explains why they included a link for Media Player. The next two screenshots show Media Player with the sync tab open.
A few other things not included in the manual:
When on All Music mode: If the shuffle is not turned on, pressing and holding the next and previous buttons allow you to browse by folder.
When on Playlist mode: Pressing and holding the next and previous buttons allow you to browse by folder.
Pressing and holding the play button allows you to toggle between the usual playing mode and the preview mode, where only a few seconds of a song is played.
Performance during Running
The sound quality is great, and with that I mean - the sound, well, sounded just right. I'm not an audiophile so I can't say anything about how accurately the earphones rendered the bass, etc. The device was surprisingly light and comfortable. As a word of caution, however: the earphones are good at blocking most of the external noise. It's probably not too safe to use the device when running on a busy road.
Performance during Swimming
Most negative reviews I've read online complained about how useless the device was when used for swimming. When I tried it, the audio was initially okay, but after a few laps the sound on my left-ear became somewhat muffled, but it wasn't completely inaudible. The key, perhaps, is to choose properly fitting earbuds so that water does not get into your ears. Note that the earbuds do not have to be of the same size for both ears. I'll try replacing the left earbud on my next swimming practice (I might bring Q-tips, too).
Update: I did replace one of the earbuds and adjusted the rubber chord between the earpieces. Every now and then water would get in and the sound gets muffled, but I just followed the procedure for removing the water from the earbuds and it worked just fine.
Memory Capacity
Four gig looks dismal in comparison with many of today's mp3 players. I'm not complaining though - I already have enough music for my usual routine.
Quick-charging
I remember being told by the promo guy about the so-called "quick-charging feature" but it honestly sounded too-good to be true that I only dismissed it as a desperate attempt to make a sale. It was probably true, I thought, but there could be a catch. Besides, the packaging didn't say anything about the feature and it was only through reading reviews online that I learned more about it. The device was already charged when I bought it, and it took several days before the battery became fully-drained so I could finally put this claim to test. Indeed, with three-minute charging I got a little over an hour of playtime, which is pretty amazing.
As per the manual, it takes 1.5 hours to fully-charge the headset. This gives around 8 hours of play time.
Verdict
Great for running. The three-minute quick charging makes this gadget a good sell-out. Not to bad for swimming as well.
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