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And tomorrow I’m going to purchase one. Ever since it’s release, I’ve been looking at it with puppy eyes anxious to get my hands on one.
I love my current music player, it plays it’s purpose perfectly, great battery life (has more than 4 times the duration of the Nano’s), great looks (though most resume it’s looks with “it looks like a lighter”), but, it also has it’s downsides.
Sony’s software is horrible.
Mind you, it’s more “usable” now than it was when I bought my old Minidisk player, but still, it’s slow, very slow, it crashes sometimes for no apparent reason and for some reason, whenever you change your registry, no matter how little the change was, the program needs to access the internet and rebuild something. While this process only takes a few seconds, it makes no sense to me except to annoy and delay the music transfer, and if I happen to be in my mother’s apartment in which I don’t have an internet access it completely blocks my ability to transfer music or open the program altogether, which has made me curse a couple of times.
The players usability isn’t one of it’s strong points either. If you’re familiar with Minidisk walkmans with the small “remotes” then you can probably consider the Network Walkman an upgraded version of them. Which works perfectly well for a playlist of, let’s say, an album for example. But when you’re trying to “scroll” down 40 tracks it becomes less entertaining. It’s terribly easy to pause, increase/decrease volume and skip tracks without removing it from your pocket, but that’s as far as it goes, as for anything else you need to take it our of your pocket and navigate through the menus twisting it once each time you want to move up or down.
Another downside is the lack of decent accessories in Europe for it. Japan has great accessories for it, and America is starting to see some of them appear, however in Europe it’s impossible, and it’s quite hard to find a trustworthy site that will ship them here. On the other hand I can get iPod accessories in almost any computer shop and I have one for each and every need I might ever have.
One for my car, one to hook up to a stereo, one for remote control, one for…
…God knows what!
Anyway, it’s almost time for bed, and I’m going to give my books a quick spin before hitting the sack and tomorrow I’ll be sure to bring you the first impressions I will get of my new gadget and hopefully I’ll even be able to study a bit tomorrow 
[tags]iPod, iPod Nano, Apple, Sony, Network Walkman, Sony NW, Walkman[/tags]
