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.
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.
Android App 
RSS Feeds 
iPhone App 
Newsletters
User reviews4
Add your review
sonymad 12 February 2012
Good: brilliant video quality great oled screen very portable noise cancelation works with windows media player and itunes
Bad: no appps and games
Comment: The Sony Walkman X-series is Sony's premium flash-based portable media player, packing Wi-Fi, noise-cancellation, a redesigned UI and a gorgeous OLED touchscreen. But can it compete with the reigning champ, the iPod Touch? In a word, no.
That's not to say it isn't an impressive player in its own right. It handily beats the Samsung P3 and the Cowon S9, but I'm left wondering who would pick this up instead of a Touch. But if Sony were to stick this UI into one of their Sony Ericsson Walkman musicphones, they might have something powerful indeed.
Click for gallery
Physical
The X-series is a very sleek player, similar in size to the Samsung P3 and significantly narrower and shorter than the iPod Touch, though ever so slightly thicker. It's designed with an unusual aesthetic: The sides of the player are this odd sort of rough, glittery metal, similar to unfinished granite, and the back and front bezel are black glass with little shiny sparkles in them, like a granite countertop. It's a nice-looking player, certainly, and it feels very solid in the hand. I just don't totally get the granite thing—it's not spectacularly eye-catching.
On the front of the X-series is the screen, an unbelievably responsive 3-inch OLED capacitive touchscreen, and a large "Home" button underneath the screen, much like the iPod Touch. The screen is crystal clear, the sharpest picture I've ever seen on a PMP—it lives up to the promise of OLED. Viewing angles are limitless, and touch response is great, without any lag at all. Unfortunately, that glass front and back are awful fingerprint magnets, though being glass, it does seem to resist scratching fairly well.
The right side hosts the noise cancellation switch and a surprisingly cheap-feeling volume rocker. The top has the headphone jack and the pleasantly firm play/pause, track forward and back buttons, while the bottom edge is home to the proprietary USB jack. Interestingly, the hold button is a giant semicircle switch on the back of the player—it seems weird, but I actually love how easy it is to reach and how solid it feels. The numerous hardware buttons make it a very nice player to control in the pocket, despite mostly being touch-based player.
The X-series is one of the only PMPs with built-in noise canceling, but it only works with the included earbuds. Fortunately, said earbuds are excellent for freebies, and the noise cancellation worked perfectly on my noisy Chinatown bus ride between Philly and New York City. Noise canceling does slaughter the battery life, though, draining it twice as fast as regular playback. When you're trying to drown out the kind of crazies who take the Chinatown bus, you'll be glad it's there.
Audio quality is a hallmark of Sony's PMP line, and the X-series does, in fact, sound great. It includes a customizable five-band equalizer for audio dorks and some nice sound enhancers like DSEE. On the other hand, you're limited to the lossy codecs Sony supports (MP3, WMA, WMA-DRM, AAC), so it may not be a good choice for serious audiophiles.
Click for gallery
UI
The home screen has a familiar grid of icons, including Music, Movies, Photos, Podcasts and some more intriguing Wi-Fi-based apps like Slacker, YouTube and Browser. Navigating through lists of artists, songs and albums is very similar to the iPod Touch style with a grab-and-flick interface, though a fast flick leads the list to cycle through a lot faster than the touch, almost like there's less virtual friction, and we'd say it feels just a hair less exact.
At the bottom of the Now Playing screen, there are four icons I've decided to term Back, Navigate, Web, and Options. The icons themselves aren't very literal: The Back icon is a bulleted list, and Navigate is a magnifying glass, so it's slightly confusing at first. But once you touch it, it becomes very clear what each button does, and I had no problems after that.
The "Navigate" button is great: It'll bring up a list containing Artist, Album, Songs, etc that'll let you jump right to that list without having to hit the Back button four times. The iPod Touch doesn't have anything like it, and now I wish it does. The Web button is also really cool: It brings up a screen that'll let you search the track name, artist, or album with Yahoo or YouTube. The Yahoo search brings up hits like Wikipedia and AllMusic, and the YouTube search immediately brings up a ton of music videos, live concert footage and more to watch on the player. Pretty cool stuff. Oddly, the X-series will prompt you to re-connect to a wireless signal every time you try to do one of these searches, and though it remembers your password, it's still annoying.
The X-series also includes an FM radio, and it's worth mentioning because it's one of the stronger FM tuners we've seen in a PMP. It's not like it'll change the way you think about radio, but it does as good a job as you could ask.
Web Apps
The YouTube app is really great, quite similar to that of the iPod touch or iPhone except with a classy sheer black skin to match the X-series' aesthetic. Videos load quickly and are very clear and watchable, provided you've got a solid Wi-Fi connection.
Slacker is another hit for the X-series, giving access to either the free or paid versions of the Pandora-like service with the same skin as the rest of the UI. It's super fast to load and sound quality is excellent.
Unfortunately, Sony's only two for three on the web app front, and the most exciting of its new features is a major fail: Its internet browser—NetFront-based, like PSP and Sony Ericsson—is completely unusable garbage. All text entry is done via an infuriating T9 interface (why not just rotate to a landscape QWERTY? There's plenty of room!) that's inexact and totally unhelpful. It requires you to type in "http://www." before every URL. Even if you've got the patience to sit there for ten minutes to type "http://www.gizmodo.com/", the browser can only manage those dinky mobile sites without totally freaking out. Browsing full sites is an exercise in futility, as the two zoom buttons don't always work, you can't navigate before a site has fully loaded and tapping links is inexact and frustrating. Basically, it's worthless as a web browser, which is a huge disappointment. This image pretty much sums up the X-series web browsing experience.
Desktop Software
The X-series has both a MTP (Windows-only) and a UMS (shows up as a drive, compatible with Mac and Linux as well), though UMS must be switched on before each connection. That means it'll work with most any media player, save iTunes. Sony's "Media Manager" software is included, but it's pretty awful, very archaic and difficult to use, and won't convert video unless you pay for the "Pro" upgrade. That last part is a real killer for the X-series' video capabilities.
Speaking of video conversion, you'll be doing a lot of it, since the X-series only supports a few video codecs and none of the common pirate formats (Matroska, XviD) are included, unlike the pirate-friendly Samsung P3. I used Cucusoft and was able to get a few MPEG-4 videos onto the player, but your average user will definitely have trouble figuring it out. None of the WMVs I tried would work, and I never was able to get a great-quality video on to test out what the OLED screen can really do. iSquint for Mac does work, but the quality, while totally watchable, is disappointing: On an OLED screen like this, you want to be blown away by video quality, and I wasn't.
Audio codec support is disappointing too, considering the X-series' stellar audio performance: The only lossless format is WAV, which nobody will use due to its massive file size. Besides the preferred lossless formats, more niche codecs like OGG aren't supported either. The player has incredible capabilities, yet Sony cripples it by limiting its compatibility—they could have courted the audiophile market, but 320kbps mp3 files can only sound so good.
Price and Conclusion
The X-series, according to Sony, is a premium gadget and thus commands premium prices—coincidentally the same prices as the iPod Touch. The 16GB version costs $300, with the 32GB going for $400. The difference is that the iPod Touch comes with a massive App Store for boatloads of new features, not to mention an accelerometer, a web browser that won't make you long for the days of WAP, tons of accessories, and software that actually works. The X-series just can't compete with that.
The X-series is a really solid player: The form factor is nice, the screen is incredible, sound and video quality are as high as these things get, and it comes with built-in noise canceling. If it were $50 cheaper, I'd have no hesitation about recommending it over the Samsung P3 and Cowon S9, but if you're spending at that level, you'd be buying the wrong machine if you chose the Sony.
On the other hand, we do see a successful future if Sony put a phone version of this up against Nokia's XpressMusic. It could never be a smartphone, not in this shape, but it could be a great music-based dumbphone.
Sony understands that PMPs can't just be PMPs anymore: basic iPods aren't selling like they used to, and the Touch is part of a mobile computing platform. But to just stuff in some Wi-Fi features without thinking about software expandability or even a usable browser—that's not going to cut it these days. Sadly, despite all the things the X-series does right, and its impressive stats list, it's just not enough in a day and age owned by networked and app-friendly gear.
Robert Sarcastic Gadgeteer Bierd 8 November 2010
Good: amazing oled screen, wifi, best sound....
Bad: it's a bit hard to put video on to it..
Comment: very easy to upload music from pc to it's 16 gb memory....
JaCkCrIpS 1 March 2010
Good: Screen = gorgeous, sound = amazing !! Oh, and it has fm radio, wifi, youtube !!
Bad: Err... took a while to figure out how to get music and album covers on it
Comment: I did have an iPod touch, but ubelievably irritatingly it broke 2 days after the waranty ran out >:( - but being a true Sony-Fanboy (i have sony ericsson phone and Vaio laptop) - I got the walkman's equivalent to the iTouch.
And it is sooo much better (for me anyway), no it doesnt have all the apps and games and stuff but what it does do it does 1 million times better! Also it has fm radio which really bugged me in the iTouch
Love it !!
See all 4 user reviews