Sony, for however much I love its designs, has remained at the bottom of the digital-audio-player heap, at least in this country. And Sony probably doesn’t deserve to have a hit of any kind at this point, but I’m kind of excited about the NW-S705 after reading the CNET Asia review of it. The 2GB Network Walkman is of course shiny and pretty with an OLED screen with a hard-to-fault interface. But what’s probably coolest is that Sony built noise-cancelling mics into the player itself, instead of relying on bulky processor units integrated inside the headphones.
The review says sound quailty was good too, and it has a rated battery life of 47 hours as well as some cool customizable options, like two user-defined equalizer pre-sets (most DAPs only have one). The biggest downside is you must use Sony’s SonicStage software for song transfers, which was slow in comparison with other flash-memory MP3 players.
Sony NW-S705 reviewed by CNet Asia [dapreview via cnet asia]