Leon

edit - I just don't belong here. Someone please wipe this post. takk.

Like the other major brands, the key is whether third-party companies would consider it feasible and come out with replacement batteries. There's also the possibility that batteries of a proprietary form factor would prevent that. (as opposed to an off-the-shelf battery from the battery manufacturer - say some PDAs just use batteries originally destined for cell phones)

And supposedly Gmail never deletes anything even if you cancel your account... is what I've heard somewhere. (excuse my grammar, i'm fiddling with my new phone )

Well I like this better than the Googlezon thing someone did last year

Get well soon Adrian (#1 of my readership) and everyone else! *pet* I've been under the weather but not nearly as bad as you guys. I remember all-nighters in college, trying to get the papers done. The papers were fine (I'm a B student who tended to get A with long papers) but the pressure did me in. I couldn't go to graduate school because -- generally people would say "oh just wax poetic or talk ---- to fill space" but I just couldn't. Since April I've been pissed off with these job search websites here in Taiwan. For publicity, they do a lot of surveys and questionnaire and invite the press over for results (which eventually translates into "you should use our service"). So there are people like my dad who believes everything he sees on TV, and conseqntly I'm nagged over my career prospects. Then over the summer one of them launched a huge ad campaign. They're everywhere: on TV in every channel during every commercial break, radio commericals, subway ads, webmail banner ads (flash animated with sound). I became so irritable over this. I've had to mute every commercial break cause they're grating on my nerves. There was a week or two where I refused to leave home cause I'll be exposed to billboards and such, and I thought I'd crumble out on the streets. Part of advertising has always been to get you to spend by way of subtle threats, but this time they really got me, sort of compounded my own job hunt difficulties. If you're already working this must seem kinda over-reacting on my part, it probably is... and I feel completely disconnected from the social mores around me, i just hope it doesn't work against me at some point (l'etranger anyone?).

Thanks spex! The Walkman Bean looks great, I think the design is the epitome of what we expect from them, less awkward than the Walkman Stick. And if the 5-way button operates the way I think it does, should be pretty nice to use. Anyone remember the cassette Walkman Beans from years back?

In theory the flash players are capable of much faster, but in reality they're usually much slower than HDD players. I'm guessing this is due to the HDD players' very powerful processors, and also, very few players are designed with constant FF/REW in mind; they're designed with the assumption that we listen to songs. Right now, I don't think it gets any faster than the iPod/mini "scrub" (press the center button once then rub the wheel; it's speed-sensitive). My HD5 and the iRiver flash players are both very fast, but not as fast or convenient as the iPods. If anyone's main use is for talk radio/audio books, the balance is heavily tipped in the iPod's direction, no matter how much you hate Apple

Thanks for the kind words

Hello, snoer.net is an experiment, a blog that centers on all things portable audio. The project is very close to my heart, it's something I've wanted to do for years, so if you like what you see, please tell your friends! :q My appearance in the forum here will be minimized, as there's quite an overlap in topic.

Yeah Sony hasn't gone the cheap route for decades. If anything they usually opted to charge a premium just because they can. I saw a brand survey for Japan, which basically says -- Sony is still the #1 brand in the mind of consumers surveyed - IIRC Toyota and Honda are top 3, Apple is outside the top 10 -- but Sony has steadily dropped in the survey of business people, with a notably low score in innovation -- Sony-related brands (eg. Sony Music, the individual product lines) have all declined in image during the last year; the iPod as a brand scored pretty much on par with the Apple brand. The survey and article's final words on Sony is that, like all large companies do at some point, Sony's banking on the goodwill it built in the past. A friend saw this and his first reaction was "well that's what Apple did in the early 90s!"

Yes they do have certain dates. Lemme start with the old, Japanese schedule: usually August/September is big for portable audio products, most MD announcements have been in these months. Products announced for Japan at this time are then announced for Europe and the US at year-end or next January to coincide with the CES. Then products of less importance (eg. niche models, cute models) are reserved for February/March in Japan. Recently though, Sony has been all over the map. If you're used to their old schedule you may think they've gone mad! The HD5/E500 was April, the Vaio Pocket was May and the HD1 was either June or July. The E100 players had mockups shown at CES but wasn't released for another 3-4 months. Looks like Sony's been furiously developing things and releasing as they go along - kinda like all the Korean makes A lot of Japanese bloggers, etc, mention the year-end and mid-year bonuses that salarymen receive, and how companies time their new products to take advantage of these, usually expensive products like TV, DVR, computers, but I think Sony would have something up its sleeve for release in this second half of 2005.

atrain, good to hear people got the joke I was eyeing the joybooks for a while (the 6000 and the newer s52), can't remember what turned me off. In the end I couldn't justify getting a laptop, and got a desktop instead

In astrology, some folks have always insisted that the 10th planet is Vulcan, and the 11th would be Apollo. Once these appear, Virgo and Taurus will finally have their own, dedicated ruling planet - not a bad deal for me with my huge virgo and taurus influences.

That's not my point... there was a car called the Austin Allegro from the 70s, and it was absolutely infamous I'm surprised anyone would consider re-using the name... and I was hoping someone would get the joke http://austin-rover.co.uk/ado67storyf.htm

Oh, and whoever came up with that name can't possibly be from the UK... Allegro *wink* If you're in the UK and don't know, ask someone who's older

An army of audio players. Sony HD5, Rio Karma, Rio S30S (3 year old cheapo model). Sony pocket radio. I think I've hit the 100 mark - throughout life I have owned over a hundred portable audio players of all kinds. I know I know, bangra or some other stud might have experienced a hundred and one The PSP so I can watch B-movies sitting in a mall for free aircon. Pen, pencil and paper notebooks. These are truly mobile and they let me concentrate on my thoughts. The expensive Moleskine is exquisite to write on even with the cheapest Bic pen. Not to mention I can easily have bought dozens of these with what I've spent on impractical, U-S-E-L-E-S-S (for my application) PDAs. I can't find a cell phone that I even remotely like - I think they're all too cheaply made and non-ergonomic. I had the SE T610 two years ago and I think it was a disaster, no matter what Rob or anyone else might think. So the phone I'm using now is the cheapest free one that was given out free with activation. Actually there are a couple Japanese phones I love (the KDDI/AU Infobar, talby, PENCK) - but they're obviously not available to me. And money is truly mobile. I've got a 12" Apple PowerBook but that's not mobile. I used to lug it around but it just wasn't. To have the $ to get online when you need to, that's what the geeks call ubiquitous mobility, eh? My camera doesn't get much love - because it's the Canon PowerShot SD10, the one from Lindsay Lohan's "Rumors" video And it's slow to focus and acts weird overall - I'm going to another brand next time round. It'd be nice if I drove, but I don't even have a license. The parking and driving environment is so horrible there's no point in incurring the extra cost. I tend to walk long stretches to go places - 30, 60 minutes on foot - as exercise.

Goodbye my NH1, probably my last MD unit ever. It's been a stormy relationship. Good riddance. etc etc etc. Goodbye, iRiver iFP-790. Big piece of hype. Good riddance, again. Hello, Rio Forge.

A lot of the sarcastic humor on DAPreview, Engadget and Gizmodo and other blog-form news sites are IMHO (and I mean it with a capital H) a tad crude and way too local. They're like gross swinger occasions where people get together and have orgies laughing at how deformed this or that culture is. This is definitely not conductive to the informative purpose of the sites, not to mention a very big disservice to people from countries other than the editors' locale. Economy of language is a virtue when you may be presenting to people whose English is very different from yours, perhaps of a lower competency. I regularly see very long Americanized sentences (that are combinations, i.e. saying several things at once) get mistranslated - I think shorter, simpler would've been a good idea. And also have a cap on the local humor content. Like the news of PSP firmware - every site picked up on the Portable TV service Sony was launching in Japan, and insist on laughing at how irrelevant that is, but they do nothing to cover what really matters to people reading from the rest of the world - in this case, the long list of features added. Example #2: Japanese corps have in general had somewhat soporific-looking presentation slides at their info sessions, if anyone follows Impress Watch or ITmedia regularly you'll see my point. No, some news sites just have to keep going on about how fake they are, how the pics must've been photoshopped. Not to mention some things they make fun of, they've done so many times and they forget and they start again (there's been a venture called Fujitsu-Siemens for years, which doesn't imply anything about Fujitsu buying or selling any of its vital organs in the meantime). My gripe with that as a reader : oh God, someone musta thought that's funny! But it just annoys like the M$ office genies.

Is the guy Japanese? Cause ATRAC in katakana suggests "Ah" trac, but that'd be because the Japanese language is that way, not an indication that Sony intended it as Argh-trac for native English speakers as well. And I have in fact never said the word in real life

I'm going to kiss Chris' virtual toes for saving me from the wrath of DAPreview...

LOL... according to some biorhythm site he and I have a lot in common, but I didn't think it'd be THIS! Oh Lordy

Me, myself, and my humongous head second only to Seann William Scott. Sorry, I'm just high on the news of PSP firmware 2.00

Allo... found a bunch of E40x/50x screen savers. Thought some of you might be interested. http://sonymatome.hp.infoseek.co.jp/nwwm/ds.html Found it via so-mo.net - the webmaster made a nice one of the W. logo and "like no other", I don't think he made it public though, bummer.

Just installed the software on my HD5 and uploaded some files. With every file I get a long line of UUUUUUUUUUUU for album, artist, track title, and Bebon for genre Interesting... probably malfunctioned a bit cause I was pulling files from the HD5's storage area into the audio block. Launched the app and I was quite shocked to see folders arranged by upload, ie. files uploaded together are in the same folder, no matter how many ID3 tag edits they go through afterwards. So group/album is still the basis of Sony's file management... the artist/genre/playlist are just metaphors like, well, the desktop. I remember this app started life on Sony's first MP3-native flash players (the mid-life revision of the E75/95 etc for Europe/Japan that added native MP3 playback). Good to see it's still available... very attractive app for an E107 *drool*

Thanks, Great Review! Don't think I've got the coherence to do one anymore I really like the Vaio Pocket's display - the iPod photo definitely seemed underwhelming afterwards. G-Sense is very nice and it's not impossible to operate the basic functions blind (the rightmost column of 5 buttons). Good to hear the battery is user-removable, I didn't realize that. I also concur re: the HDD access is too frequent. My HD5's like that - very unusual coming from an iPod (and to a lesser extent, the Karma).