Product Reviews

It's not often that we come across expensive electronic products that are designed to look like vegetables. For whatever reason, though, Sony's NW-E205 looks like a large plastic bean.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a bean-shaped MP3 player, of course, and in fact this design has some advantages. There's enough room inside the bean-shaped case to hold a proper USB plug. Push aside the cover at one end and it pops out, ready to plug directly into your computer.

The rest of the case has, it appears, been filled with the rechargeable battery. The NW-E205 charges from a computer through the USB plug and then seems to play forever. It ran continuously for 50 hours, which is unheard of for an MP3 player and is closer in operation to Sony's MiniDisc players.

Unfortunately, the player is fiddly to use. Its controls consist of three buttons and one four-way rocking switch, and accessing the menus is trickier than we'd like. More annoying, though,

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is the hold switch. This locks the other controls so that the player doesn't switch itself off or skip songs while it's in your pocket. Unfortunately, hold is activated and deactivated by sliding the USB port cover, and it's a real pain to use.

Transferring music on to the player is just as annoying. Sony's new MP3 players can play MP3 music files, but you can't simply drag music on to the player in Windows. Windows Media Player 10 recognises the player and will automatically synchronise your music files, but the player refused to play any music copied in this way. Instead you are forced to use Sony's SonicStage software, which is unnecessarily complicated. If you want to fill the player just once, its bearable, but if you want to add and remove tracks continually we recommend that you avoid this player.

The NW-E205 doesn't support DRM-protected WMA music files, so it's no good if you're planning to boost your music collection with downloads from the internet. We think it's about time Sony started to support online music stores.

Once you've loaded it with music and got the hang of the controls, the NW-E205 sounds good. The supplied headphones are acceptable, but they don't produce much bass. The sound quality from the player itself is better, so it's worth adding a high-quality pair of Sony or Sennheiser headphones if you can.

The NW-E205 will suit some people but annoy others. Its cute design and huge battery are great and the built-in USB plug is handy, but using SonicStage is a pain. It's OK, but not great.