Hands-on with Sony's NW-A815

By Nate Lanxon on 01 October 2007, 12:04pm

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Sony gave us our first taste of its drag-and-drop music players back in July. Today, we're looking at the big boy in the Japanese juggernaut's MP3 player line-up, the NW-A815 (also known as the NW-A816 and NW-A818 -- the larger capacity models). This is a 2GB MP3 and video player that doesn't require Sony's bloody awful SonicStage software. Huzzah! Where are our balloons?

This is a really sexy little player and is strikingly reminiscent of its predecessor, the NW-A808. These new A-series models have retained the stylish metal casing, the silver trimmings and the simple set of navigational controls. Also retained is the iconic menu system, which uses attractive glowing function icons. Navigation is simple and intuitive, and a fun 'Time Machine Shuffle' randomises songs based on the year of their release.

The A815 supports MP3, unprotected AAC (yes, those iTunes Plus purchases work), unprotected and protected WMA and WAV audio files -- that's right, no ATRAC, Sony's proprietary audio format offspring. It'll also play back your H.264 and MPEG-4 video files on its 320x240-pixel screen. Sony's batteries have always been good performers when they're not catching fire and there's been no shortcomings here -- battery life is rated at 33 hours for audio and 8 for video.

The really great news is, of course, the absence of SonicStage. Instead, Windows Media Player handles syncing, or you can simply drag and drop media files through Windows Explorer. The reliance on SonicStage, which was about as fun as cleaning a guillotine, always stole marks from Sony MP3 players' scores -- if you've not used it, you've not missed anything. Abandoning SS will surely add kudos points to this new model's final judgement.

The NW-A815, NW-A816 and NW-A818 are on sale now for £89, £99 and £129, for 2GB, 4GB and 8GB models respectively (yeah, Sony model numbers are confusing). Click through for some tasty photos of this promising new music player. -Nate Lanxon

Update: reviews of the Sony Walkman NWZ-A815, Sony Walkman NWZ-A816 and Sony Walkman NWZ-A818 are now on the site.