Sony NWE405

Wednesday

I just got in from a night in the local bar so I'm sorry if this is more garbled than usual.

Sony delivered an NWE 405 this morning. I would have ordered the one gig 407 but I was put off by the built in radio and if half a gig of MP3s isn't enough there has got to be something wrong somewhere. I suppose that if I was en route to the Moon or Mars even one gig wouldn't be enough.

I bet those guys get their downloads free.

It's small but not as small as Merl's Shuffle. Mind you it claims to have a battery life of 40 hours and it's got a display. My problem is keeping the phones in my ears. The damn things are uncomfortable and just keep falling out - that's the phones not my ears.

If my battery gets flat can I take it into a Sony shop and get recharged if there isn't a USB port where I'm staying?

One Week Later

The NWE 405 has a phenomenal battery life and the recharge time is also extraordinarily fast. The SonicStage software that comes with it is less than impressive.

I filled the memory with individual MP3s and then decided that I wanted to start all over again. Eventually I decided that the best way to do it was to create a new folder and put the tracks I wanted to use in that folder, then transfer all the files in one go to SonicStage and then into the NW 405. That worked much better than loading individual files from a SonicStage folder created by SonicStage itself. I think I could have batch converted the files to ATRAC that the Sony would accept if I dragged and dropped them from Windows Explorer but I'm not sure about that.

The first time I loaded it I got 99 tracks and the second time I got 102 tracks.

It works well but SonicStage is a pain in the ass.

Milt's Rant

Have you noticed how buses are always late when it's raining? It's been raining in Bogsville since noon yesterday. There are big puddles everywhere. Everywhere that is specially marked out for the blind, that is. On the way back from the bar I noticed that the drains are remarkably dry. They have been put in the high spots so that the water doesn't drain away. The specially constructed blind crossings, the ones with the raised bumps in the paving stones, all lead to the middle of a lake.

To avoid them you have to walk into a main road and risk getting knocked down. Nice work chaps!