For the same money as a 1gb iPod shuffle, circa £90 you can now get an NW-E005 2gb MP3 player that comes not only with bigger memory but also a rather snazzy screen and better controls. Set to arrive in the UK in just a few weeks we got a glimpse of this baby MP3 player.

So lets look at why the Sony Flash Walkman NW-E005 is a potential Shuffle snapper. First up it has a screen, Apple insisted that the beauty of a shuffle was that it was random and that's what we wanted? Well as many Shuffle owners will tell you it soon wore off and they ended up setting the players in sequential mode and that's when you miss the control of being able to choose racks and albums.

Sony have equipped the NW E005 with a simply stunning Organic EL or OLED screen, sure its small with just one line of text being displayed but its enough to be able to navigate by and it looks great clipped onto your fleece. The mighty 2gb of storage should be good to store around 32 hours of MP3 audio encoded at 128kbits although all the press you'll see revolves around Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 encoding format. The NW-E005 and its smaller cousins the NW-E003 1gb players will handle MP3, ATRAC3, WAV and also WMA but sadly not WMA with digital rights management (DRM) or Apples ACC format, so only the Sony connect store can offer legal downloads.

The Flash Walkman measures just 79mm in length making it feel like holding a USB key in your hand and at just 25 grams its hardly heavy. Sony will ship the NW-E005 in pink, blue, silver, violet, black, and lime green along with a range of accessories like an arm band and cases. Also rather strangely the smaller 512mb NW-E0002 and the 1gb NW-E003 have the option of a FM tuner where the pick of the bunch the NW-E005 does not. All models get a time and calendar function and stop watch although a calendar on a device with a 1 line display doesn't sound that practical.

We've saved the most impressive bit for last, the battery life of the Sony flash walkman is quite special, Sony quote a run time of 28 hours when playing ATRAC3 in power save mode, although MP3's will hurt this you can still expect over 22 hours of replay forma single charge. That's where it gets really good The NW-E series can charge very rapidly gaining 3 hours playback time in just 3 minutes and it does all of this via the fast USB connection.

The package ships with Sony's Sonic Stage software version 3.4 which while far from perfect is at least free from critical flaws! simply plug up your flash player to a host PC and let the files move over USB under control of the sonic stage software.

All in all it's quite a package and Sony hope to dislodge Apples grip on the lower end of the MP3 market, of course it's not just the iPod shuffle as there are many many players in this segment and some of them have bubble gum sized players with all these features and more, like the MPIO One.

However Sony have the brand to carry this off and tempt people away from the ice white shuffle for some more funky looking sounds, the Sony NW-E005 and its smaller cousins are sure to be a hit.

Published - 15/04/2006

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