Review on Sony Walkman NW-A105 Hi-Res 16GB 🎧 MP3 Player in Black - Enhanced Audio Experience by Taurus Monsalve

The worst thing about this player is its "technical support". These are low-level "techies" who are basically checklist monkeys. Your job is to follow a flowchart put together by a middle manager whose ultimate goal is to do whatever it takes to deny there's a problem. I say this as an ENGINEER who wrote the software and made the actual hardware for such devices. Your "technical support" will find every little thing not to take responsibility. Did you connect it to Sony headphones, did you connect it to Sony car stereo, did you use Sony software to download music to SD card? Sony tech support is so bad that I returned FOUR (4) Sony NW-A55s and ended up refusing them due to software bugs they deny, but I can play every time. The last thing they say is that "you're the only one reporting this," which is their excuse for shelving this as essentially a delusional customer report, rather than using it to run their own internal tests to verify that problem to reproduce. They expect the customer to be a free beta tester or QA department. This is a horrible practice that many of the tech companies you work for engage in. Let's go back to the NW-A105. I have a SECOND device. The first device had the exact same issue, but Sony continues to deny it. They will have you jump through every hoop imaginable to see if they have a way of pretending the problem doesn't exist. In my case the problem is that if you use headphones first and then plug them into the 3.5mm analog line-in of the car stereo, the device will not work with a line-in device. 2 other Samsung and Apple devices don't have this problem on the same car stereo, but Sony NW-A105 has this problem every time. If you restart the device (which you never have to do and will take forever) it works and says it's a software bug. Most devices constantly check the voltage and impedance characteristics of the 3.5mm jack to output the correct line or headphone level voltage depending on the impedance of the connected audio output device. Laptops, cell phones, tablets, etc. do the same to determine how much voltage to put out. Well, not the Sony NW-105 unless you reboot it, which is a software bug Sony needs to fix. So GOOD LUCK to those horrible tech support guys who are getting their engineers to fix the issues. Also, they will force you to talk to different technicians, causing you to lose more than an hour repeating the same thing over and over on multiple phone calls only to find out that all the previous people you spoke to aren't themselves have commented on this correctly in the text. Remarks. The device itself is beautiful. The LCD screen compares very well to weaker Chinese competitors. The only thing better than Sony's LCD displays are the Apple iPod Classic and iPod nano displays, which are very bright, offer wide viewing angles, and offer excellent color reproduction. Other competitors like Fiio fall far behind in comparison. The touch screen is pleasant. The physical size of the device and the buttons are just to die for. Compared to other players I've tried, it's a lot smaller, lighter, and a great piece of engineering. Aside from the original iPods with wheels, this is the only player that you can use without looking at it or touching the touchscreen. This is very important when running outdoors. You can't go wrong with a touch surface. If you're running outside and it's raining, snowing or just plain wet most devices are useless, but not the NW-A105 (and A55) as they actually have hardware buttons. I can even operate the keys with gloves. I like that it runs Android. Their older model (A55) doesn't run Android, but rather Sony's proprietary OS, which is good except it doesn't handle large datasets (and Sony refuses to acknowledge this issue). Android doesn't seem to have such limitations on the A105. Sony has its own player software running on Android (like the one on the A55) which works very well. However, being Android, you can also use any number of other software players like VLC, Media Monkey, Pi Music Player, etc. This is great as you are not limited to Sony's officially supported music formats which are not open source. Industry standards like OGG. The use of Android as the base operating system and the ability to download any software on it make it an extremely versatile player. The battery life sucks. It's a small device with a small battery (like the A55, which is physically the same size). If you turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, turn on Android sleep mode, and make the screen very dim, you can increase battery life a bit. But the battery life can be up to 2 hours under normal circumstances. Even if you use *some* audio software to process your music collection (I have 200GB on a 256GB SD card), it can sometimes take hours. So it must be plugged in otherwise it will kill the battery in no time. I have to emphasize that despite the small size of this device, it is a full-fledged Android computer, so more user control is required to achieve acceptable battery life. So the player is very good. Android is good. However, expect serious problems with Sony as a company. They will dismiss your claims and deny there is a problem, just like automakers do. Expect them to waste your time. They *can* just take your report and work overtime to isolate the problem themselves, but instead they will waste your time using you as an unpaid Sony employee. Your politics are terrible. Also, expect them to use kernel options like factory reset, which will take hours of your time to get the settings back to what you want (reading songbooks takes hours initially). I returned FIVE Sony units because they keep having the same issues, which Sony denies. It's a shame because they probably have the best or second best product, but their support is terrible. Typical Sony. Your technical department is great. The rest of the company sucks and bears a lot of responsibility for the engineers' hard work. Let's see what happens in a few weeks. Will they again say it's a hardware defect, make me return it (more time), get another one, tweak it only to find the exact same problem again (more time)?