We all know Sony has a lot of big problems to solve before starting to offer some serious competition to the iPod, mainly on the software side. But there are also a lot of little issues that may not be that important individually, but nonetheless bug users and may add up to big annoyances. Here are the ones that came to my mind. Add yours. I'm not mentioning the obvious ones, like poor playlisting features (especially on-the-fly), unreadable screens in the sun, etc.
- Slow navigation: Sony needs to be less stingy and put more RAM in their players. The 3-4 second lag to get into a menu shouldn't exist, at least not as commonly as in the HDD Walkmans. That can be easily solved by adding memory and caching the database there, instead of on the hard-drive. Considering Sony already charges a premium for its brand, that shouldn't add much in terms of cost. And if you advance to players that display album art and photos, caching for fast browsing is an absolute necessity, otherwise the experience can be frustrating.
- Sorting the alphabet: It's about time Sony's players learned to list The Beatles under B, instead of T. Rio has put that in the Karma more than two years ago. Actually, Rio has made the Karma identify even Die Zauberflöte as a piece for the Z entry, not D, or Il Postino as P. Apple and Microsoft don't go that far, but at least for the English they know how to separate the article from the substantive.
- Use visual resources: Sony took the right decision, in my view, when it decided to include little icons to identify artists, albums, tracks and genres in the HD series. Unfortunately they went the Apple way for the A series, simply listing names without any icons at their side. That's a step back in my opinion, since the old system gave you a clearer, more immediate idea of where you were. Sony also opted to follow Apple and put all fonts looking the same in the menu. It's something I always thought made the iPod more confusing. I think the "All Artist" menu at the top of the lists should be in a different font, or with some sort of icon differentiation, so that it would have a clear distinction that that's not an album or track name. The Vaio Pocket differentiated that by using double icons. It's the right thing to do. Use visual resources for the easiest navigation. (By the way, why does the "all" menu in genre take to the track list, insetad of the album list?)
- Add composer: Sony is the only company offering gapless playback, an important "feature" (the quote marks are for the fact that this should never be considered a feature, but simply part of basic playback) for classical music. Why doesn't it take advantage of that and let people browse by composer? Especially for a company that had until recently a dilletant conductor as its CEO.
- Add album artist: Connect Player has added the distinction between album artist and song artist, which is useful to sort albums that include various performers. Why hasn't that made to the Walkmans as well?
- Include time remaining: Or at least total time of the track. But I like the fact that the Now Playing screen displays title, album, artist and genre. (It could lets us choose between genre or composer for that fourth item.) Just don't follow the waste of screen space format of the iPod. More information is good, though I agree data like bitrate and format could be left only for the detailed track information, since the majority of people don't care about it. By the way, it would be nice if a detailed view included comments or lyrics.
- Less title scrolling: Give us the option to choose the size of the letters. Some people may prefer to have more information displayed, and therefore less scrolling, instead of big letters. My HD1 has a smaller screen than the A3000, but it actually shows more. That doesn't make sense.
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Beethovenian
We all know Sony has a lot of big problems to solve before starting to offer some serious competition to the iPod, mainly on the software side. But there are also a lot of little issues that may not be that important individually, but nonetheless bug users and may add up to big annoyances. Here are the ones that came to my mind. Add yours. I'm not mentioning the obvious ones, like poor playlisting features (especially on-the-fly), unreadable screens in the sun, etc.
- Slow navigation: Sony needs to be less stingy and put more RAM in their players. The 3-4 second lag to get into a menu shouldn't exist, at least not as commonly as in the HDD Walkmans. That can be easily solved by adding memory and caching the database there, instead of on the hard-drive. Considering Sony already charges a premium for its brand, that shouldn't add much in terms of cost. And if you advance to players that display album art and photos, caching for fast browsing is an absolute necessity, otherwise the experience can be frustrating.
- Sorting the alphabet: It's about time Sony's players learned to list The Beatles under B, instead of T. Rio has put that in the Karma more than two years ago. Actually, Rio has made the Karma identify even Die Zauberflöte as a piece for the Z entry, not D, or Il Postino as P. Apple and Microsoft don't go that far, but at least for the English they know how to separate the article from the substantive.
- Use visual resources: Sony took the right decision, in my view, when it decided to include little icons to identify artists, albums, tracks and genres in the HD series. Unfortunately they went the Apple way for the A series, simply listing names without any icons at their side. That's a step back in my opinion, since the old system gave you a clearer, more immediate idea of where you were. Sony also opted to follow Apple and put all fonts looking the same in the menu. It's something I always thought made the iPod more confusing. I think the "All Artist" menu at the top of the lists should be in a different font, or with some sort of icon differentiation, so that it would have a clear distinction that that's not an album or track name. The Vaio Pocket differentiated that by using double icons. It's the right thing to do. Use visual resources for the easiest navigation. (By the way, why does the "all" menu in genre take to the track list, insetad of the album list?)
- Add composer: Sony is the only company offering gapless playback, an important "feature" (the quote marks are for the fact that this should never be considered a feature, but simply part of basic playback) for classical music. Why doesn't it take advantage of that and let people browse by composer? Especially for a company that had until recently a dilletant conductor as its CEO.
- Add album artist: Connect Player has added the distinction between album artist and song artist, which is useful to sort albums that include various performers. Why hasn't that made to the Walkmans as well?
- Include time remaining: Or at least total time of the track. But I like the fact that the Now Playing screen displays title, album, artist and genre. (It could lets us choose between genre or composer for that fourth item.) Just don't follow the waste of screen space format of the iPod. More information is good, though I agree data like bitrate and format could be left only for the detailed track information, since the majority of people don't care about it. By the way, it would be nice if a detailed view included comments or lyrics.
- Less title scrolling: Give us the option to choose the size of the letters. Some people may prefer to have more information displayed, and therefore less scrolling, instead of big letters. My HD1 has a smaller screen than the A3000, but it actually shows more. That doesn't make sense.
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