Sony Walkman X Series 16 GB Video MP3 Player w/ OLED Display
- 16 GB capacity for about 4000 songs
- 33 hours of audio or 9 hours of video on a single charge
- 3-inch, 262,144-color OLED touchscreen display with 432 x 240 WQVGA pixel resolution
- Supports MP3, WMA, AAC and L-PCM audio formats; AVC(H.264/AVC), MPEG-4, and WMV DRM video formats; JPEG image files
- One-year limited warranty
Rediscover music with the 16GB X Series Walkman(R) video MP3 player. Boasting a stunning 3.0-inch OLED touch-screen display, digital noise cancellation and wireless connectivity, the X Series takes portability to the next level. Equipped with built-in Wi-Fi, you can connect to the internet and access your favorite websites including Yahoo!, YouTube and Slacker Personal Radio. You can also subscribe to your favorite podcasting sites and receive podcasts straight to the MP3 player via a Wi-Fi connection. The X Series also features advanced audio qualities and comes with premium EX noise canceling headphones. Internet Connectivity – Podcast download, register podcast on browser and link to podcast web site Related Links function relates web content with music content playing on your Walkman(R) X series. Connect directly to YouTube and Yahoo!; Internet Browser; Wireless LAN (Wi-Fi) connectivity to Home Wireless LAN and to public Wireless LAN. Supports Wi-Fi Protected Setup… More >>
Sony Walkman X Series 16 GB Video MP3 Player w/ OLED Display
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5 comments
M. Atkinson on September 12, 2009 at 4:48 pm
IT SOUNDS AWESOME! But that’s the only good thing about it. The supposed OLED screen isn’t that bright, and compared to the ipod touch 2G, it looks the same! It’s web browser isn’t bad. . . IT’S HORRID! It is reminiscent of web browsers on you cell phone. It has a cell phone like keypad that you use to type in the website. IT TOOK ME 20 MINUTES TO TYPE IN THE WEBSITE! I kept hitting the wrong keys, and then the Walkman assumes the letter you want to hit and places it like a T-mobile cell phone would. And it doesn’t present the website like it should look, it just shows it’s contents. It is smaller than I expected, and watching a video with it is sad compare to an ipod touch, which has a bigger screen. If you are just looking for a great mp3/4 player and don’t care about web browsing or wi-fi internet, then this is 5 stars! Otherwise, I would stick with the iPod Touch.
David Chatenay on September 12, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Let’s get the good out of the way first: the sound quality is indeed impressive, the screen is gorgeous, the touchscreen is very smooth. WiFi, Rhapsody, YouTube, battery life, build quality, sturdiness: all good.
Now for the bad, first on the software side:
-for a player that boasts such an excellent sound quality, the lossless codec support is very poor: only WAV is supported, but the files are huge. Where is the FLAC or Apple lossless support? These formats are extremely simple to decode. Right now, I’m re-encoding at 320kbps AAC to save space, but I haven’t found a way to add the artwork back. Fail.
-the podcast application is terrible. [...] website is dreadful, there is no search, it’s far from a complete source of podcasts, there is no support for iTunes-style podcast URLs, and the podcast download fails 90% of the time, unless you keep it “awake” every 30s by taping the screen (and even then…). Epic fail.
-the browser is buggy and slow. Fail.
-Mac support… What can I say… itunesmywalkman is decent but far from a seamless integration into iTunes. Also, eject doesn’t work properly: the player reconnects automatically, forcing you to unplug the player.
-the typing interface is annoying: why can’t we get a complete touchscreen keyboard instead of the T9?
On the hardware side:
-I can’t get a good ear fit with the included earphones. My Etymotic ER6i are way better. The problem is, if you don’t use Sony’s earphones, you can’t use the noise cancellation feature. Fail.
-Bluetooth would have been convenient for file transfer or A2DP, but it’s not there. Fail.
-a proprietary USB cable means one more cable to carry around. To be fair, Apple is as guilty of this as Sony. Still, a micro-USB plug would have been nice.
-the case is ugly: weird dark metallic paint on the back, and funky styrofoam-like grey plastic on the sides: huh?
So overall, it’s a nice effort, but the execution could be better. With a bit more polishing (especially on the software side), this could have been a fantastic player. Of course, Sony could make good and offer a software update that could address a lot of the issues I described, or offer a SDK and let developers come up with better software. But I wouldn’t bet on it…
Jerry Frederick on September 12, 2009 at 7:31 pm
The good has already been described by the other reviewers. The unit is a strong mp3 player, with a couple of gadgety features that work well when connected to WIFI. The achilles heel of the unit is video formats. Why have a beautiful OLED display if getting a video file onto the unit is next to impossible? I have spend two full days sending files back and forth and only one out of ten will play successfully. This is for files of the supported formats of Windows Media and MPEG4. There is some sweet spot of bit rate and size that is mentioned nowhere in the documentation. The included content transfer program is worthless and tells the user nothing other than if the file transfered successfully. At times it truly appears random.
Why in 2009 do players not have the ability to play and decode even their “supported formats” in all bitrates. This does not even touch on its lack of support for DIVX, XVID, or MPEG2. There is no excuse for a 300USD unit to not perform both audio and video functions. This harkens back to the gyrations that one needed to perform when Creative Labs was releasing crippled units in the late 1990’s. I have owned at least twenty different audio / video portable players and this unit is by far the most frustrating. A huge amount of potential totally crippled by lack of adequate video support.
Danno on September 12, 2009 at 8:29 pm
I really like this player a lot. The sound is fantastic, the size is just perfect. I had a couple of problems with setup that were pretty frustrating. First: I transferred my music collection via the software that comes with the unit, only to find that most of my album cover art did not transfer! When I opened a ticket to complain about this with Sony, they just said use windows media player 11 to transfer the collection. I tried that, wow what a frustrating product. My album art would not show up in there either, dispite showing up fine on itunes and MediaMonkey. After several days of trying to get the art into windows media player, I finally just erased everything on the unit, and then used mediamonkey to transfer the collection, and all my album art was finally there. Thank goodness for MediaMonky!
Second issue: Slacker music would NOT refresh. Again, Sony customer service was uselss. They didn’t know the product at all, they told me to download from slacker to my pc, then upload to my unit via usb connection. I told him you can’t do that on the slacker website, and he said “we don’t support third party websites” useless! I finally found out by rebooting my router, it will refresh correctly. What a pain! So I have to reboot my router when I want to refresh slacker, oh boy. If not for the above two problems, I would have given this 5 stars. I like this even better than my itouch, and have started using this over the itouch.
Wanted to add my thoughts on podcast function. One of the reasons I was searching for another player than the itouch was I had a couple issues with how itouch handled podcasts.
First, it treats podcasts just like music, it will play all the podcasts back to back, without stopping. I hate this, as a lot of times I listen while I am lying in bed at night, and I fall asleep. when I wake up it has wasted the battery by playing through all the podcasts in the list, which each podcast being up to an hour long, not to mention marking the podcasts as having been played.
Second, it is very hard to skip ahead in the podcasts with the itouch, as you can’t move the slider bar with any sort of accuracy. The sony walkman stops after playing each podcast, finally! Also, by holding down the forward button, it skips forward in a more controlled manner than the itouch (itouch has the same hold the forward button function, but it is not as easy to know where to stop).
The updating of podcasts via wireless connection is nice, but I don’t see a use for it, as it takes a long time. I will continue to use my pc to download all the latest podcasts and then usb to update the walkman.
So in my opinion the podcast function in the walkman is fantastic, although I am still waiting for some product to put in a 30 second skip forward, as it would be nice to skip the commercials in the podcasts easily.
Frankie on September 12, 2009 at 10:35 pm
I honestly wanted to like the Sony Walkman X. I must agree with all the other reviews regarding the sound quality and the noise-cancellation feature. Totally amazing. The form factor is also fantastic, but here’s why it was difficult to justify almost $400.00 for this player:
1. The wifi was useless to me. I don’t like Slacker. I wanted to connect to last.fm, and Pandora using this player, and I was NOT able to connect to either of these two free music services that don’t hit you with commercial ads.
2. Rhapsody To Go is a very good music subscription service, but Sony chose not to give us full Rhapsody support with the new Walkman X. Why not? Who knows? Honestly for $400.00 it should have had full Rhapsody support.
I really wanted this player to be my new portable music device, but it falls short, and it’s too expensive for what it gives you. I ended up purchasing the Sony NWZ-S639 at Best Buy. For some reason the S639 is only available through Best Buy.
Frank