Sony NW-A800 Review

Sony offers with the new NW-A800 series Walkman a new digital audio and video player in the iPod nano size range. What catches the eye right away is the large screen. That is no accident as Sony focuses on video playback on this small player. The Sony NW-A800 can show video in QVGA resolution with 30fps. My review unit comes with the Spiderman 3 trailer. The video looks great on the new Walkman.

Gallery

12 images

Benchmarks

The new Sony Walkman NW-A800 is not quite as thin as the Apple iPod, but you can say it is thin with 13.5mm.
The NW-A805 I have here for testing features a 2GB memory. As said the screen size is the highlight of this player. With 2 inch and QVGA watching video works well. The user interface is clean and straight forward.

Sony has with most of their players a big advantage in the battery life category. The NW-A800 is no exception. You get 30 hours music playback on this player.

Sony provides features like shuffle playback, song search, clock, photo display, album art display and play lists on the NW-A800.

Sound quality is great as you would expect. The setting options include equalizer, VPT surround, DSEE sound enhancer, dynamic normalizer and clear stereo.

The NW-A800 series supports MP4 video with up to 2,500kbps bit rate. H.264/AVC is also supported.
As said in the introduction the video quality is great on this small DAP.

Besides SonicStage to manage your media, Sony also bundles the Walkman Launcher software. The Walkman Launcher gives you direct access to the different media types and to the Sony video download site.

Verdict

Conclusion

Pros

• Video Playback
• Great battery life
• Superb screen
• Small size

Cons

• Old fashioned design

no WMA-DRM support

SonicStage Software depence

no Apple OS support

Verdict
From the feature point of view the Sony NW-A800 Walkman is a great portable media player. The button based interface with the volume keys on the side is just not state-of-the-art since years. Sony needs to adopt a scroll wheel or scroll bar soon. If you are into watching video on the go the NW-A800 is a very small and high quality solution for this.

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