Sony's underwhelming Network Walkman
The batteries last for seventy hours. The. Batteries. Last. For. Seventy. Damn. Hours. OK? We're trying hard to find something nice to say about Sony's latest and not bash them by reflex, but that's about the best we can do. The NW-E95 Network Walkman is priced somewhere between a 15GB and 20GB iPod (closer to the 20), has 512MB of memory, and only plays back the ATRAC3 and ATRAC3 Plus formats. It's small and light, sure, and the batteries give a mammoth seventy hours of continuous playback, enabling you to run through all the songs that fit in its memory again and again until you're screaming for release. But after the recent flurry of genuinely decent stuff that Sony's been putting out, it's disappointing to see them slip back into producing something average and uncompetitively priced, even if you hardly ever have to change its batteries. (There's also a 256MB model, the E75, but it's not cheap enough to make us forgive them.)
