Buy Now...

Sony uncharacteristically have been very late to the hard-disk based music  player. While they touted their proprietary mini-disk format in various forms, with and without compression, the rest of the world followed a more open route. Surely with such a late entry into this market, the king of portable music would come up with something special the twarte the designs of would be pretender Apple and their ever more popular iPod range. Sonys first product, the NW-HD1, reached these shores in October - so, is it an Apple killer?

First impressions are that this just looks great! For my money an order of magnitude better than anything from Apple in their iPod range. The brushed aluminum exterior and tiny dimensions make this 20 Gbyte music player look very appealing. And it is. It's just so unfortunate that yet again, as so many times before, Sony decided to go down the proprietary format route despite this time being no where near first to market.

The NW-HD1 does not play MP3 format music (despite many retailers advertising this as an MP3 player). That's a real pity, because over the last 5 years or so I've just about managed to get every CD I own copied to my PC in, you guessed it, MP3 format along with a good chunk of my old vinyl collection. I've used that format both directly on my laptop, to burn MP3 format CDs and for my little solid state MP3 player I use for running. But not on my brand new gorgeous Sony NW-HD1. It only plays something called ATRAC - Sonys own proprietary format.

See also: MP3 players

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The NW-HD1 also comes with it's own jukebox software - something called 'SonicStage'. I've been using Media Jukebox so I was a little annoyed that I had to use something different. I'll probably review SonicStage separately, but the important point, and the only reason for making the change, is that SonicStage will translate MP3 to ATRAC on the fly (so claims the instructions). So all is not lost, I don't have to manually copy/translate my music collection to ATRAC.

I pointed SonicStage to my MP3 music collection and pressed the download, and true to the claims it does translate to ATRAC 'seamlessly'. Unfortunately it took 27 hours and also as a side effect used every last byte on my hard drive.

I now have my music on my music player - I only seem to be using about half the capacity right now, so plenty of room for more. Unfortunately although I have some new CDs because of the pain of transfering I haven't yet copied them over. I will do - at some point.

Operation

OK - so you have your music on the NW-HD1. How does it perform? Very well in fact. The controls are fairly minimal, a 4-way rocket on the front provides up, down, next and previous navigation along with 'select' by pushing the button in the middle.  There is also a separate menu, volume and 'lock' swtich. The screen display is clear, at the top level showing a list of artists, selecting one of these gives albums and then finally tracks. With a lot of albums navigation to a particular artist is a little painful. The scren shows 5 lines of information. There is no way I've found to navigate to an alphabetic position so scrolling through 500 artists to find the one you want can be a little slow. Holding down the scroll buttons for an extended period causes the display to go into fast scroll, which I found meant it shot straight past the bit I wanted!

The sound is great! Can't fault that. The menu has a useful 'line-out' mode that boosts the output volume such that it's more suitable for plugging into another amplifier, which I often do.

Battery life is claimed to be 30 hours, something which I found hard to believe so I tried it. Amazingly I actually got 30 hours of continuous play. That's more than enough for just about anything I can think of.

Connection to the PC comes via a docking cradle and USB2 connection so transfers are fast, as long as you ignore the time to translate to ATRAC of course! The cradle doubles up as a charging device. You can leave it in the cradle to play from mains, but you have to unplug the USB cable to stop it going into transfer mode.

Apart from the SonicStage interface, the NW-HD1 also appears as a removable hard-drive on the PC so you can also use the spare capacity for data backup or data transportation if you should need that facility.

Sony and MP3

Sony seem to have quite rapidly realised their error in trying to force another proprietary format on the world. This product only reached the UK shores in October and has already been replaced by the NW-HD3, which does support MP3 natively. It is a real pity that Sony damaged their reputation in bringing this device to market in this way.

Apparently Sony are now so embaressed by this that they have now started to provide a firmware upgrade service. This is available in Japan now and Europe from mid-January. Unfortunately you have to send them your NW-HD1 machine - it's not a software download. This also seems to be a amajor over-sight. Upgrades such as this should  be a case of downloading new firmware and updating the flash memory in the product. Sony ommitted this facility on this product! To get native MP3 playback you have to send them the machine AND £15! It is worth it though, and when the service is available I will be one of the first to make use of it!

If you also have a NW-HD1 or NW-HD2 then there are some preliminary details of the upgrade service at the following link:

Note that I can't confirm the information of that link, it's not obviously a Sony owned site, but there has been much discussion of this upgrade on various discussion boards over the last few weeks.

Summary

The basic hardware of the Sony product is great. The build quality is excellent, battery life is the best on the market and it has looks to die for. Unfortunately I get the impression Sony rushed this product to market without enough research, maybe trying to get in for the Christmas rush?  They should have waited a while longer. The NW-HD3 is the product they should have shipped. Assuming the MP3 upgrade is no hoax then this product with MP3 will, in my opinion, knock the socks of any other MP3 player out there.

With MP3, this product would have scored all 5s, without MP3 I can't in all fairness rate it higher than I have.

If you are offered a NW-HD1 at a *really* good price it's worth thinking about getting it and upgrading to MP3.  I'm guessing that Sony has a large collection of HD1 products it needs to offload, so you might find what is basically a very good music player going very cheaply.

If you are offered a NW-HD1 at a good price, and don't have any other music players and are happy to use Sonys ATRAC format then this is a very good product, but I'd still recommend getting the more recent MP3 version.