After the rather tragic [or not?] death of my old lousy MP3 player, I started looking for something "good". And by that I mean something that has nothing in any way resembling an iPod. And it's actually both very annoying and very sad that nowadays it's very hard to find a simple MP3 player that both does the job and is not somehow trying to imitate an iPod. =P
A couple of years ago I got my mom a Philips MP3 player which has turned out to be a very nice one, so that's where I started. Trouble though, was that I was looking for something very compact, and with some very specific functions, and Philips doesn't have that. And well, No, I didn't look at Sony Walkman at first. Why? Well because I wasn't hearing a lot of good things about it on one hand, and on the other hand back when I was buying my mom's player, they officially had nothing interesting.
After searching through the catalogues of some of my usual go-to brands and a few others, and not finding what I was looking for, I did eventually end up back at Sony's door. And that's when I come across the "NWZ-B173F". To me it seemed rather perfect. Small, comfortable controls, clippable, with radio and voice recorder and the pretty nice zap-in feature and a tiny but clear screen. But then of course I looked into the reviews and once again it didn't look very good.
The reviews paint a pretty unseemly picture of the Walkman players in general, and this model very much so as well. Main target of criticism is the design of the player, and the USB cap. It's been said for instance that the cap is a loose fit, and starts to fall off after a few uses. And that the controls don't function very well. There's also been criticism on the sound quality and just about everything else.
Reading through the specs and having a closer look at the design, I decided to go with my guts and get the player anyway. And I'm so glad I did!!
It's been a few months now since I started using the NWZ-B173F, and I'm EXTREMELY happy with it. I can't for the life of me understand where all the nonsense comes from. The cap is not loose, the controls are perfect, and the sound quality is superb. I'm a bloody audiophile after all, I would know.
Now this wouldn't be such a big deal on it's own.. but I think I'm starting to see a pattern. In the past few years, Sony has produced some brilliant hardware, all of which have somehow ended up with either unfair, or really terribly unfair reviews. What is going on here? I mean I know that they have also produced their fair share of pure nonsense, but how exactly have their line of Android tablets and ebook readers ended up so underrated? Heck, even the NEX cameras are quite underrated, for what they're capable of.
So well, yes, I am a bit of Sony fangirl I guess. And this is my attempt at exonerating the Walkman MP3 player. I'm also planning on writing about a few more pieces of Sony hardware soon enough…
A while ago I wrote here that I was no longer certain whether or not MS Courier is still going to come to reality. Well, happily, I just saw this article on Engadget, with some new news on Courier. Apparently this very neat gadget is very much in development, and below you can get an idea of how it will look like. =) YAAAAAAY! Honestly I'm impatiently looking for this one to arrive, I totally want [well, more like need! =))] one!
Silly little thing I recently fell in love with, and purchased from eBay... ah... I just had to show you this! =D I'm not really into iPods or other advanced MP3 players since I usually simply use my Palm for my portable music needs. But I also felt the need for something extra small and lightweight to run around with easily [and no, I didn't consider iPod shuffle. I don't like Apple hardware at all, honestly.] ... and here it is. Introducing, my cute little Mickey player from Walt Disney. Weeeeeeeeeeeeee it's so cute! =D
This is actually the night we went to see Avatar. It was snowing like MAD! =P
Yes, you may laugh at me all you want... but here's my latest eBay adventure. =P I incidentally came across possibly one of the last survivors of the floppy disk era, a 9 year old external [USB] Microtech floppy drive that has somehow been sitting in it's box somewhere waiting.. getting bored... not being used...! =P
Well you see, I still have a load of my old floppy drives in some really nice colours [ ;) ], containing old games, a heck of a lot of code [yeah like code I wrote when I was 9!], graphics, and all sorts of other odd and even things. And obviously none of my notebooks have a floppy drive. And somehow, I have this nostalgic feeling towards floppy disks / drives... =D Well, lets just say that I really had to have it. ;) Here it is:
My Microtech floppy drive connected to my notebook.. [and those are the different colours that the lead can have [there's like 15 or so of them.. =))))] ...
So a few months ago, I saw this article on Gizmodo about Microsoft supposed new and fancy tablet, and I have to admit I really liked what I saw. Then recently, at CES 2010, Steve Ballmer went on the stage to display the HP Slate with Win7 on it. Very cool, but certainly nothing like the Courier, or at least the Courier idea.
Looking around the web, I've seen a lot of disappointment articles and comments saying that MS just killed Courier with the HP Slate... on the other hand, as I said, they 2 have nothing to do with each other, and I've read / heard a lot of people saying that Courier is still going to happen. So now the question is, who's right? Did MS kill courier, or not? Ideas anyone? Info anyone? =P
Having used my beloved eReader for close to 5 months now, I think it's time I wrote a bit about it to share with you how I find it so far. And yes, those are indeed little hearts you see in the article title. That mean I LUVVVV IIITTTTT! =D A while ago out of pure accident I came across one of Sony's most ingenious little ideas, the Sony eBook Reader. I suppose you could see sparkles in my eyes when I found out what it was and what it did. I could finally be delivered from the pain of having to read all my eBooks on my monitor. I have to add here, I read a lot and I have a truly large number of eBooks. [You can see a part of my library here.] I'm not really a big fan of paper books because of obvious reasons. If I were to store the paper version of all the books that I currently have, I would need to rent the white house. In addition, I once had to leave behind my library of paper books when I was migrating from one country to the other. That was certainly not an enjoyable event. So now, for me it's all about eBooks. I guess you can imagine what it would mean to me and what kind of freedom I would achieve by being able to load a handful of my eBooks into a tiny gadget and carry it around wherever I want, just like a simple paperback. It would also mean that I won't have to worry about staring at the monitor for 12 hours strait and tiring the heck out of my eyes. Obviously the first thing that I did was going through the specifications of the eReader. I noticed that there's a main book format for the reader [BBeB aka .lrf], and it also supports most of the major formats including PDF and TXT. It also has the ability to display JPG images in gray-scale, and play mp3 files among other sound formats. That was all I needed; I was sold. But then I also started looking into the online user reviews for the gadget and that turned out to be somewhat disconcerting. I read a whole lot about how people were unhappy with the fact that the display is in gray-scale. There was also tons of rant about the loading speed for each page, and I even read comments saying that the screen would break by a touch! And that's to mention just a few... To my good fortune, I was too taken by it not to take the risk. Despite all the sad reviews, I decided to buy one. [Now given that the reader is only available in the USA, how I managed to get my hands on one is another story altogether..] Well, obviously I'm now more than happy I took the risk. The eReader is probably the most useful piece of electronics I paid for in the past heaven knows how many years. As it turns out, it's indeed a splendid little gadget. The time it takes to load each page is pretty much equal the amount of time it would take the human hand to turn the page of a paper book. You can change the size of the font to your liking, and the display is just fantastic. You can read the font clearly from any given angle. It's light, easy to carry about and the battery charge lasts for a mighty long while. The sound quality is also very nice and it can easily rid you of your mp3 player. As for the physical strength of the screen... well I have a feeling some people might have tried playing squash with it, in which case it would definitely not last. But if you know how to use an electronic gadget, you won't have any problems. And not to forget... to my deep delight, the eReader supports both Pro Duo memory sticks and the old fashioned SD cards. The only thing that doesn't make me very happy right now, is that since the eReader has been released for the USA, at the moment the users outside of the USA are not able to directly connect to the Sony Connect Store to buy the BeBB books for the reader. That however was not a problem for me since I already have tons of eBooks to read with the eReader, and regardless of where you get your eBook, you can read it with the eReader. Even if you want to have BBeB books, there are tons of free applications out there that would take your PDF or RTF or whatever else you have and convert it into an LRF. At the end, it is the fact that this gadget is not for everyone, and I can see clearly where all the negative reviews are coming from. Buying the eReader, would mean that you're paying almost twice the price of a PSP for something that does not display you colours and you can't play games with it. This gadget is for true readers, it's meant to make easy the lives of people like me who spend hours and hours reading books. Don't expect from it what's it's not meant for, and then pour your frustration into a negative review. And yet, don't miss it if you're a bookworm as I am. =)
Seriously! I think I'm totally in luv with this pretty little piece of technology. What am I talking about? Well I'm talking about what u see here in this picture. SONY's FJ series notebook, and specifically the one in sky blue [what a surprise eh? :P]. It's actually very cute, and very light. I've been using this baby for a while now and I don't think I've ever been so happy with any of my systems before....believe me when I say the interior is even more impressive than the exterior. To name a few of the features that I'm really happy with: the motion eye camera with built in microphone, the comfy keyboard, the double layer DVD+R, the 1.86GHz processor, the 100GB hard drive, the XBRITE LCD and so many more. U can have a look @ the complete specifications here. To anyone who might be planning on buying a notebook: make sure to have a careful look at this one, u won't regret it!
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Friday, May 09, 2014
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