Sony NW-E507 Mini-Review

Sony NW-E507 Network Walkman 1Gb Flash Player w/ FM Tuner Mini-Review

Created May 31, 2005

This is a small player. It looks almost too much like a shiny lighter. Which is probably good as some sort of camouflage, making it less likely to be stolen. There is no mistaking it for a lighter once the bright OLED display comes alive, though. The device is very well made, with attention to detail, and no part of it looks "cheap". The mirror finish looks nice but makes any smudge or fingerprint very visible.

For those who care, everything is made is China, and the player is sold in one of those molded transparent plastic cases that are so difficult to open, and are usually reserved for much cheaper items (maybe it's an indicator of how much this device cost to make ?).

Other useful items bundled in: a special (mini-B, I think) USB cable, a soft pouch, a plastic clip, a pair of earbud headphones and an audio adapter cable.

The controls are well-thought, a Sony trademark of sorts. There is a large play/stop button, two paddles on the "shoulders" for volume, and a multifunction joystick control around the headpone jack. The joystick works like a watch crown. Pushed down, it puts the device in "hold" mode, which is where you want it to be while walking around. It has two other positions which allow the control to rotate to skip the song or album (depending on the position) and to fast-forward or rewind, by keeping it turned. Fast-forward is quite slow and painful, probably less than 2x.

There are two more tiny buttons on the face. One changes the display modes (track/album, summary view and a couple more rather useless graphical modes) and switches to/from FM when kept pushed longer. The other brings up the song browser (by album, artist, group etc), doubles as a BACK button while browsing and can also invoke the settings menu. Unlike the volume or the joystick, both require a bit more effort to press than I'd like, and the device seems to agree by creaking a bit.

On the back there is a similar small button to switch the repeat mode and the sound mode (through what appears to be three bass settings).

Finally, at the bottom of the "lighter" you can find a plastic cover, which, after being properly scraped off with your nail, reveals the mini-USB jack.

You have to lug around the cable with you, if you plan to hook the player to another computer (although the reasons to do that are severely limited, more on that later). This makes the device a bit less "portable" when compared to other devices (the Shuffle), who can be plugged right in the USB port.

The NW-E507 stops playing when connected to the USB port on the computer. Since you have to do that to charge it or save the battery, say, while squatting with your laptop at a coffee shop, this is somewhat of an annoyance. I suppose this is to prevent crashing when you update its internal library from the computer, but it could've been made smarter to stop playing only when it actually gets new data, not when it's charging.

The blue OLED (organic LED) display is very "cool", looks very nice behind the silver mirror face. Whether it's off or on, it never looks like an ugly square LCD panel. This is the future of digital displays for now, we'll see more and more devices using this technology. However, unlike other OLEDs, this one is incapable of displaying shades (the pixels are either full-on or off) so Sony resorted to some dithering every now and then. I also noticed a low refresh rate that may bother some. Finally, the text is displayed in a monospaced font which looks out of place in such a nicely designed device. A proportional font would be more readable, not to mention could display more text. This is entirely firmware-dependent, so it could, (heoretically at least, be fixed with an upgrade. Here's what I mean:

this is text in monospaced font
this is more text in a proportional font

As it seems to have been the case with past Sony attempts at the portable digital device arena, a top-notch electronic product is spoiled by imposing artificial limitations to it, and by pairing it with, to put it mildly, annoying, hard-to-use, unstable, bloated piece of software called SonicStage.

In a surprising move, SonicStage also installed DirectX 9c without even asking me. Surprising, because it doesn't exactly look like the kind of software that would need the latest 3D card rendering support. The interface, including window borders and controls, is drawn entirely by the application, and is no doubt the creation of a designer who was "bored" by the standard Windows interface people are accustomed to and wanted "something better", yet didn't buy into much of the UI usability mumbo jumbo. And it shows. Boy it does. It is definitely much slower and harder on the eye than your normal application, and the functions it does, it appears to do them with much difficulty.

But what is it that it does, you ask ? SonicStage is the "music library management" software that you'd need to use if you wanted to buy music from Sony's "Connect" store to play on the NW-E507, or burn to a CD. So far so good. What's bad is that it's the only way to upload any playable content to the device, even your own mp3s. You can transfer files to and from the device's storage area, which does appear as a new drive letter, but the player will ignore any music files you upload that way. So automatically (and unnecessarily, I might add) Linux and Mac are out as workable platforms, despite having proper USB storage support. This reminds me of the early digital camera days, when you had to use the software that came with the camera to download your pictures. Nowadays, the cameras universally support the USB storage standard and can be accessed from any OS.

Can it get worse ? It can. Your own mp3 files uploaded via SonicStage are stored encoded in a separate folder on the device's drive. You can't get to them other than via SonicStage, of course, and it won't let you download the files back, unless you perform an "authorization" process with a remote site, which is a procedure I don't care for when all I want is to use MY device with MY own music, on MY computer. While I haven't tried it myself, word on the street is that it will also refuse to upload content from another computer, unless the existing content on the player is wiped first.

It is certainly not unexpected to require special handling for files purchased from the Sony music store. So if I got nothing else better to do with my money than spend it on "protected" content so that some media mogul, somewhere, can enjoy controlling how many times and at what times of day I can play, that's fine. So long as we understand that is the deal. What is absolutely, definitely, undoubtedly NOT OK is to step in and begin controlling what I can and (mostly) cannot do with my own files and the device that, to my knowledge, I now OWN. Neither is Sony's business, period.

This strikes me as a quite illogical move by Sony. These unnecessary restrictions imposed by the software only serve to reduce the usefulness of the NW-507 player, and ultimately, IMHO, will be responsible for this product not taking off as it deserves. When other players allow you to freely upload your content to the storage device, which will happily play whatever it finds there, making it more difficult for people to access their own data does not look like a particularly smart move. Plus, there is this assumption that oozes from everything this software does, that I'm considered a thief and it's up to me to prove otherwise, or I don't get to use my toy. Sometimes I feel that Sony Electronics needs to split and break its ties with Sony Entertainment if they want to be taken seriously.

Oh: I found that SonicStage uses OpenMG, a Consumer Rights Restriction technology developed and pushed by Sony. It seems all their devices use this, so I have just resolved to not purchase any other product that has OpenMG mentioned anywhere on the box (or itself). Sorry. Life's too short to be wasted dealing with arbitrary restrictions like that, and I find it odd some company expects me to pay money so they can POLICE my own computer. Nuh-huh. Not me. I like the FREEDOM to choose what I do with my own stuff, and whether I want anyone to record my music listening habits or not (hint: I don't).

[Updated Jun 5, 2005]

I have heard of another device with a similar look (minus protruding controls) and an almost identical display. It's the 512Mb Philips SA-177, which hasn't been released yet.

Sony, SonicStage, OpenMG, Walkman are trademarks, I believe of Sony Corp.