The UI for the video player is fairly self-explanatory and has had no significant changes to other previous Walkmans. All videos are played in landscape mode and for those who are wondering, the A845 does not have an accelerometer. Also, there is no built-in speaker onboard the A845, so you’ll need to be putting in your earphones all the way through the movie. Its also annoying when you want someone to watch a video with you on a trip in the car, for example. On the other hand, the good thing about the A845 is that you can opt for a cable for the which allows the A845 to deliver the video to a supported TV at 720 x 480 at 30fps. Video playback is expected to last nine hours on a fully charged battery.

On the contrary, the A845 scores perfect marks for us as a photoviewer. This is largely due to its superior OLED display and fast and response slideshow interface. Anyone who has had a chance to play with its photoviewer will be impressed with how well Sony has perfected this compared to its predecessors. The experience would probably have been made much more better if the A845 boasted a touchscreen per se but then we’d be asking for abit too much.

Audio function wise, we don’t think Sony can do anymore to further improve the music player’s functionalities. Sony’s music player has always been filled with a range of functions which you wouldn’t be able to find in iPods and this is still the case with the A845. Sony has equipped the A845 with quite alot of tech and these include S-Master Digital Amplifier, Clear Audio and DSEE Sound Enhancement, our favourite of all as always has been the Digital Noise Cancelling. This if you haven’t heard of before works only with a range of Sony’s earphones which boast noise cancelling function, the Walkman is able to detect it if a non-NC pair of earphone is plugged in. While the specific NC settings do a pretty good job, I must say the earphones that were included with the A845 plays a role too. Music playback time is expected to be 29 hours on a fully charged battery.

Music, videos and photos can be transferred to the Sony A845 via drag and drop with a wide range of files supported or even via iTunes using the supplied software.

Conclusion

Other notable features which we haven’t mentioned in this review include FM radio and podcast, these are largely self-explanatory, simple and were practical to use during our review. We felt there were overall little that we could complain about and the A845 boasted many of its predecessor’s good features which Sony has appropriately brought forward. The elegant design of the A845 certainly merits taking a look if this is the quality that you look for in a portable music / video / photo player. Its also perfect for those who find it annoying having to fuzz with new applications, touchscreens and just desire something that simply plays good quality music and videos. Because the Sony NWZ-A845 haven’t in fact come on sale yet at the time of this review, therefore pricing information is still to be confirmed. We can’t comment on how practical it would be for its price range to buy as we do not have any idea of this ourselves but we will update this in due course. Overall we have summarised what we felt were the good and the bad bits of the new Sony A845 below…

Pros

• Elegant, well made slim and lightweight design
• OLED – great for watching videos
• Easy to use UI
• Practical functions that simply work well at what they do, as seen in previous generations of Walkmans
• Comes with high quality premium earphones
• Reasonable battery life
• Use its iTunes-supported software for transferring files if you like, if not just drag and drop

Cons

• Does not record videos, giving it a disadvantage if comparing to the likes of the latest iPod Nano
• No built-in speakers
• The UK version will only have 16GB

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