Sony Walkman NWZ-X1050 (X series) review: Sony Walkman NWZ-X1050 (X series)

You need to have a Max Mosley-style tolerance for punishment to take on Apple's iPod touch. Pretty much every company that's tried has been the recipient of a serious whipping. But, when you're the company that invented the Walkman, it must be impossible to resist having a go. It has to be said that the 16GB Sony Walkman NWZ-X1050 and 32GB NWZ-X1060 look pretty good, as they not only have an OLED screen but also boast video playback, Wi-Fi and an FM tuner.

7.5

Sony Walkman NWZ-X1050 (X series)

The Good

Excellent sound quality; effective on-board noise-cancelling technology; good screen.

The Bad

Slightly awkward design; expensive; limited range of features compared to the iPod touch.

The Bottom Line

The Sony Walkman NWZ-X1050 certainly has some great features, such as a vivid OLED screen, on-board noise-cancelling technology and pristine audio quality. But it's expensive, the small screen makes for awkward Web browsing and video playback, and, overall, it's not as slick, easy to use or as feature-packed as the iPod touch

The NWZ-X1050 (reviewed here) is available for around £190, while the NWZ-X1060 costs around £250.

Design
The NWZ-X1050 is a relatively small device -- it's only around three quarters of the size of the touch. The design doesn't look quite as classy as that of some of the other music players we've seen and Sony's made some odd design decisions. For example, the sides of the device have a sort of rough granite feel. While this makes the player easy to grip in your hand, it's not exactly easy on the eye.

The OLED touchscreen is much more visually appealing, however. Although it only has a resolution of 432x240 pixels, because of its relatively small text, graphics and videos look very sharp. It's also offers excellent contrast, so blacks are really black and colours look much more vivid than on rival players. Like the iPhone's display, the screen uses capacitive technology, so it's also very responsive to touch.

Although Sony has added hardware buttons on the top and side of the player, making the NWZ-X1050 easy to control when it's in your pocket, the player's user interface also makes good use of touch control. For example, you can browse through your music library by flicking through album art via a Cover Flow-style 3D view.

Also, when you're using the player to watch video, it will automatically create thumbnails of sections of the video. You can then quickly skip to specific parts of the video by gliding your finger across the thumbnails. Video playback is limited to MPEG-4, H.264 and WMV video formats at resolutions of up to 320x240 pixels only, but playback is smooth and videos generally look quite sharp on the screen.

Performance
The two key factors that really make this player stand out are its on-board noise-cancelling technology and the general high quality of its audio playback. The noise cancelling only works with the supplied earphones. These have small microphones built into the outer edge of each earpiece that monitor external audio and feed it back to the player so that the noise cancelling can work its magic. You can choose from three different modes -- 'bus/train', 'airplane' and 'office' -- with each tweaking the algorithm for the best response to that particular noise profile. The results are very good, competently suppressing much of the rumble and rattle of a London Tube journey. You can get similar results using a good pair of noise-isolating earphones, though.

The supplied earphones actually sound pretty good and can handle a sizeable helping of bass without descending into a sea of distortion. Its only when you swap them for a higher-end pair with larger drivers, however, that you'll really hear this player sing out. Used with a good pair of AKG headphones, the player does a sterling job of handling not just the low end, but also the mids and highs too. Form the aggressive funk of Gil-Scott Heron's Lady Day and John Coltrane to the crunch of Megadeth's In My Darkest Hour and everything in between, it really does produce remarkably warm, yet refreshingly crisp and detailed, audio that's a cut above that of rival players.

The player offers up the usual EQ presets, but it also lets you tweak its five-band graphic equaliser manually. There's also a 'bass boost' setting to play around with. The results vary from the subtle to the extreme end of the scale, at which point it sounds like you've got your head buried in a night club's bass bin. There are plenty of other audio-enhancement features too, ranging from the gimmicky 'virtualphones technology' surround-sound setting to the impressive 'digital sound enhancement engine' setting that does a good job of squeezing more life and dynamic range from your compressed tunes.

Unlike the touch, the NWZ-X1050 has an FM tuner. Reception proved pretty good when we used the player around London, and you can adjust the sensitivity of the auto tuner so it will skip over stations with poorer reception. The tuner isn't Radio Data System-enabled, though, so it doesn't show station names. Although you can save presets, you can't add names to them, which is rather annoying.

The NWZ-X1050 also has an easy-to-use YouTube player and a built-in Web browser. Unfortunately, the small screen and awkward controls make the browser quite fiddly to use. For example, zooming has to be done manually using the two on-screen controls -- you can't simply double tap on a column of text to make it appear full screen, as you can with Safari on the touch or Opera on Windows Mobile phones. Also, when fully zoomed out, it doesn't even bother rendering text, instead displaying lines as a series of dots. It all adds up to a pretty poor browsing experience.

Battery life is fairly run-of-the-mill too. From a full charge, the player can keep pumping out tunes for around 33 hours. It will keep you entertained with video for around 9 hours.

Conclusion
If you value sound quality above all else or are likely to make heavy use of the noise-cancelling feature, the Sony Walkman NWZ-X1050 is definitely worth a look, even though it's pricy. We still think, though, that most people will be better off with an iPod Touch because, in most other areas, it's got the NWZ-X1050 licked, while also throwing in a superb Web browser and offering a cornucopia of useful applications that you can download from the App Store.

Edited by Charles Kloet