Ascariss

source http://www.pmptoday.com/ interesting to see that its still 8 and 4 gig models, with no 2 gig model being sold. I guess the rumoured 16 gig nano is not going to be sold or even made? unless it will come later. if the 8 gig capacity is true, good times may be ahead for us sony fans. now if only sony got off their behinds and introed something already.

or western digital, but make sure its not the maxtor ones. but seagate is great as well.

you should get it replaced with a new one, and not get rid of it.

lol i guess you've never had itunes crash on you...and on a mac.

until steve jobs gets rid of his turtle neck. ipod designs are bland and without imagination, even the iphone design sucks. i don't think i'd move to apple ever, even if sony still kept sonicstage i would stay and bear it out.

lol trondis, a bit too much no? no way all of that will fit into a small portable player, maybe 10 years from now. solar panel, unlikely, don't think you can have a solar panel and lcd at the same time. wifi? unlikely, bluetooth yes, with adapter like A and S series have. The player should be small and light only possible with flash, not large capacity hdd. as for large capacities, there have been surveys done, most people rarely fill these players up woth 40 or 60 gigs, the majority have 100-200 songs on there, and using the extreme case, a 320mp3 ave length of 5-6 min per song 12-14 megs, thats only around 2.8-3 gigs, depending on average length of the songs. so the majority of users don't need the capacity. audio, video and pictures, yes, A series has done it. ebooks unlikely, since the player would have to be a bit larger than average so you could read the ebooks, which goes against your idea of small and light. codec support depends not on sony, but the chip inside the unit, I've already posted the info regarding the older A series and what codecs it could play and it is a lot more than what sony alloted to it. therefore for more codecs to be supported, drag and drop would be the only feasible option, not drag and drop via a program either. composer? hmm not many people listen to classical music using mp3 players, lyrics are on feasible for cds that have the lyrics provided for songs, most other genres outside of common music, like rock, hip hop, pop, etc, do not have lyrics provided. fast search by alphabet is available in the new a series isn't it? as for radio, depends on the market, so i think sony would play it save and just leave a normal fm radio to cover as much as the market as possible. remote, perhaps, I would have said yes if this was a minidisc, but a pmp with a large screen? maybe if by using the remove the main screen on the device didn't turn on, then perhaps yes. otherwise, hmm not sure. like LG1 said, xvid support is needed otherwise encoding into another format would suck. your ideas are great and I would agree with some, but in the end only so much is cost productive and feasible with current technologies available to comsumers. my guess flash is the choice for sony, but with apple snapping up so much flash now, and flash prices expected to rise, perhaps sony will switch to hdd for some future units. finally i for one would want the player to pause whenever the headphone jack is removed from the player, so when plugged back in, the music restarts and another important factor for sony would be design. unlike apple, sony should focus on designing a good looking pmp that makes people stare at its beauty all day.

yup new s series. I just hope it is still on scheduale.

what functionality would be lost? the linked song feature on the older a series? sure it eventaully works for some songs, but the gimmick is pointless, I don't need sony telling me what artists are shared or similar. intelligent shuffle. top 100? i never use it, nice to see what i listen to most often but another gimmick. as for renaming songs, I use winamp to do that, and sort my files using windows explorer to specific folders. for playlists I already use winamp, and import them into connect player. And yes you've guessed it, winamp is my primary mp3 player on my pc. I woud rather have the ability to drag and drop mp3 files into the player to listen them then rather loading up a program and importing them. itunes and sonicstage are not just drag and drop, they have the ability for you to drag and drog from the programs library, which is not true drag and drop. in addition, these programs add a nice dash of drm when you are dragging and dropping. I believe creative or sandisk use drag and drop, and functionality is limited in those players, in fact, its wider than the sony ones.

the a800 needs sonicstage, as do the newer NWe1x players, same goes for the s700 series. so it is far from dead, since all the players in most markets need SS, only the new, yet to be on sale B series doesn't need it. a program doesn't need updates if it is working fine and no actual major bugs exist, if bugs are discovered or errors a new version will be released probably. if sony chooses to ditch SS for future players, then SS support will slowly be dropped and by this time next year it might not even be supported anymore.

hmm the thing is, if sony choose that route, they would have to provide a simpler version of sonicstage that only transfers and encodes atrac but does not add drm to it. In addition, they would have to allow drag and drop for mp3, aac and wma using windows explorer. hmm if sony intros drag and drog for all their models, would they theoretically work on macs?

yes that is what i am referring to scms, since once i opened my minidisc back in the 90s, that one of the first things i read about when i was reading the manual.

err not really since, the drm didn't have to be added onto the minidiscs/songs and only the algorithm to compress the music could have been used and still allow people to transfer on and off the music off the player, but sony added the drm to stop illegal sharing of music.

12 hours does not suck compared to other players and sony knows this since there is so much you can do with the mp3 codec to minimize battery life. no other firms support this none, flac is more popular, aac, wma and mp3 are the leading codecs. next, people are now buying music off websites, like itunes or whatever, and those songs are in wma, or aac or mp3 format. the latter for me, and I don't want to be transcoding from mp3 to atrac to get extra hours on my mp3 player, since the transcoding is going to make the songs sound like crap. atrac was devoloped with drm in mind, and of course they could remove it, but sony stated it is moving away from drm in its mp3 players. it is obvious other future players might or could support atrac, but if all subsequent players ditch sonicstage, then atrac will die along with it. I still can't find the specs on the other sony players' battery ie how many mAh the batteries have, since that will determine how much they can play in the end. if anyone knows those details would be appreciated if they could post them. edit, the A1000 has a 600mAh battery, which is good for 17 hoirs sony claims, but I only got 12-14 hours with mp3 192.

i am sure someone could do a test on the a800 playing a 128 and 192 mp3 on it non stop and see how long it plays, i tested my a1000 and a3000 that way, and its the only way to be sure what real time the player will produce. battery life depends on the size of the battery, the bigger the more time you get out of it. again would need to check sony vs apple battert, the mvA or whatever its called.

you apparently failed to read what I wrote, 12 hours seems to be the standard for most mp3 players without atrac.

Ok I did some digging around, hehe since I wanted to see what else on the market is available. I can most of you are not in favour of this player, since 12 hours is poor compared to other sony products and the thing looks cheapo hehe. Sure I agree on the former, but not on the later, the player looks fine, almost like a mini PS3 lol. One thing that is weird is the players name.' NWD-B100. anyone care to help with the name? I know E stands for economic/economical, S stands for specialized and A for advanced. what does D or B stand for? drab? beat down hehe? just joking. if anyone knows please do tell. I looked into the other sony players and their playback. -The NW-E015 model says up to 30 hours of continuous playback, reading lower on the page, that estimate is based on "During continuous playback in ATRAC @ 132kbps at power save mode "Super" when equalizer is not in use" -the S700 model Continuous Playback Time: Approx. 50 hrs. *2 (with Noise Cancelling Function ON = 43 hrs.) "50 hours playback with built-in lithium-ion rechargeable battery in ATRAC 132kbps at power save mode “Super”, Noise Cancelling/Clear Stereo/Equalizer/VPT/are not in use" I doubt 50 hours is the average most users get, but 35-45 prob is the average, depending on what is turned on and what bitrate is used. -A800 model up to 30 hours of continuous playback in atrac 128, not the greatest bitrate, I myself don't use atrac, and never will once I moved off the minidisc, and will stick to mp3 since I buy my songs off online stores, plus encoding mp3s to atrac to listen to them on my player is a no no, re encoding is a sin. Move away from sonicstage How is this a bad thing? There should be parades or CNN specials devoted to the fact that a sony mp3 player has appeared and it's attached to a special program that you need to use to get music onto the damn thing. in fact I myself couldn't be happier with this news and hope that subsequent players from sony follow this route. sony said it would ease up and even abondon drm so I guess ditching Ss is the first step. drag and drop is the way of the future and probably the best move by sony by a long shot. SOnictage was and still is the one thing that prevents many people from actually buying sony devices. why? just check the forum how many people have had problems with SS or connect player, too many. I myself had little problems with connect player, but previous version of sonicstage for minidiscs were horrible and just not up to spec with other sony software. I think creative has drag and drop, and sandisk uses WMP to get music across no? so in a way sony wants to battle it out with creative. we'll see soon enough in september. 12 Hours of Playback Of course 12 hours is pathetic for a sony product, but that is because there is no atrac! and 12 hour is standard for most players. I checked around and the results are similar for other products. Rarely do people listen to music for more than 3-4 hours a day, the average users at least, and then recharging after 2 days is fine. Here are some comparisons from other products. The ZEN stone plus at 2 gigs provides only 9.5 hours of continuous playback with this note "Actual battery life will vary with use" checking sandisks page, it states that the playback is around up to 20 hours for music. (sansa e200 series) 4-8 gig flash units, something along the lines as the A800, so inline with the sony product, if you compare mp3 playback time. A sansa express 2 gig player has around 15 hour playback with 128kbps mp3 files. (something like the B100 but a bit bigger) Ipod shuffle - 12 hours of playback, fully charged. so in reality 12 hours is not that bad for a small player from sony, and around the same for other players on the market. again battery life depends all on size of the unit, and capacity, the B100 is smaller than the shuffle i think and even the sansa express, so therefore the battery life of 12 hours is fine, the ipod site didn't mention what bitrate the files were in. I will guess and assume that the sony one is based on 128 mp3 as well. I'll say it again, 12 hours is industry average, and sony like any other company can't squeeze out too much more battery life from a li ion than any other firm, unless the codec is different, ie atrac. sony is on track so far regarding its devices, i was expecting the b series earlier but august is not bad, wonder if that will push back any other releases. apologies for any spelling and grammatical errors.

told ya it was coming wierd that the 4 gig model is not going to be sold. haha if this is not sold in canada, I might pick one up when I am in europe in december.

any new versions of SS would appear once new products appear, so possibly this fall christmas seeason.

http://www.anythingbutipod.com/forum/showthread.php?t=17459 i saw this and am wondering how plausible is it with the a1000 and taking the 4 gigs and replacing with 4 or 8 gigs? assuming the swap could be done, how would i go about making hte firmware work? :/

the a800 is classified as a video mp3 player on sony canada's site, so regardless of what it says on other sites, the a800 has excellent video and sound.

e-reader is a niche product, niche products don't do well in small markets. interesting enough a few models are missing now, ie the older E00x models are gone of our site, as is the S2 sports player. currently left with the new NWE01x series, 1 and 2 gig models, the S700 series 2 (pink) and 4 gig (black), and A800 series 8 gig, 2 4 gigs and 2 2 gigs, so compared to earlier in the year, march - may, the model count has dropped off, but this may be due to new models coming,

different demographics, same thing in the automotive industry, canadians buy have quite different tastes in cars so we get models the US doesn't. guess it applies to the mp3 player market as well.

given a choice between space and battery life, i would go for battery life and access time.

false, its lithium ion, so doesn't matter, charge it fully and use it. the battery has no memory effect so it doesn't matter how much you discharge it before recharging. I've done this to my a1000 for the past year now, no problems, same battery capacity.

I would disagree from what I know that is coming from sony. there are already china only models, and I don't see why this can't be a bean replacement here in canada and elsewhere. something tells me a release in july is due.