Out of the box it looks very neat—as you’d expect—and all the instructions are fairly straightforward, not that you really need them. As you can see from the pic it comes in four colours (black, red, blue and pink and a huge plus for me is that the device connects directly to a USB port and file transfer is simply drag and drop, no cables, no awkward proprietary software. The supplied earphones are great as well, very comfortable, and block out ambient noise pretty effectively. The claimed battery life and quick charge figures both make pleasant reading but I’d be lying if I said I’d tested these even vaguely, what I can say is that I haven’t made a conscious decision to charge it since it arrived. It’s had the odd minute or two plugged into the PC while I’m putting more tracks on and that’s been sufficient for it to keep my ears busy for over three weeks of regular use.

There are four equaliser settings with a fifth slot for custom setup, and the sound quality is actually very good by default, but honestly once I’d turned on the Bass Boost feature I wondered how I ever lived without it. You can drop the volume way down and the range you get is still remarkable, it blows away anything I’ve seen or heard before from comparable products and I haven’t turned it off since.

The display is good too, a 3-line LCD covers track and artists details adequately and the backlight is excellent, although during playback there are some seemingly random and incredibly hyperactive LEDs that flicker around until the novelty wears and you turn them off. It features a voice recorder as well and it works great, it’s just one of those additions that I’ve never really understood the merit of - personally I’d much rather have seen an FM radio.

Now, when I read about ZAPPIN™ I couldn’t help but shudder a bit, the name alone instantly set off my ‘gimmick alarm’ but as it turns out I’m actually becoming a bit of a fan of the feature. You hit a button temptingly labelled “Zap” and the player scrolls through the album (artist/genre/etc) you’ve chosen and plays you a few seconds of each song until you hear the one you’re after, at which point you can press it again to play the whole track from the start. For an album you want to hear beginning to end it’s obviously useless, but for example I found it came in handy when hunting down particular tracks before I had committed their titles to memory.

It’s not all good though, in fact the large “jog” dial on the front for navigating the menus and skipping tracks is one of the clumsiest things I’ve ever seen on a piece of Sony hardware. You’re expected to nudge it right to skip forward through tracks and yet counter-intuitively nudge it left to scroll down through menus; it makes no sense whatsoever and goes some small way to spoiling what would otherwise be a really excellent user experience. Whether or not this is a just personal gripe or a genuine interface cock-up remains to be seen, but admittedly it’s the only minor issue that I managed to find with what is otherwise an outstanding product.

Tech Specs:
Memory: 2GB
Battery Life: 18 hours
Quick Charge: 3 minutes charge = 3 hours playback
Width (mm): 90.9
Height (mm): 23.3
Depth (mm): 15.2
Weight(g): 28