Sony Walkman NWZ-S639F 16GB Review

Ok. I bought this mp3 player about a month ago and all i can say is wow. Sound quality is awsome. Lightweight, easy to navigate and overall very impressed. My only issues is You have to make playlists before you put the songs onto the player. Is there anyway round this? I already have 2000 songs on my player and when i connect to my laptop it won't let me create playlists using the songs on the player. If i do this it syncs the songs from the player to WMP.
Also will i lose the songs on my player if i sync to different media players? I sync'd my player to media player on my pc and then when i wanted to do it to my laptop it said the player was already syncd to another device so i just cancelled. Any ideas?

P.S I really don't want to put anyone off this player it is honestly brilliant. If you listen to the same song on the ipod and then on the player you will be blown away at the better sound quality from the sony player.

I bought this player to replace my (antique) iPod mini. I'm very dissappointed and I'm probably going to buy a Nano sometime in the future. I'm not an iPod fanboy at all, I bought the Sony due to its superior SQ, and I expected it to be mostly equivalent in terms of other features. It's not.

The Sony interface is TERRIBLE compared to the mini. Selecting songs is all right, but volume control and scrolling within a song is INCREDIBLY awkward without an "analogue" control like the scroll wheel. I listen to a lot of audio lectures, and skipping to the half-way point takes forever, it's quite simply not usable for this purpose. The same is true for DJ mixes: don't like a song within a mix? Enjoy holding down the FWD button for 20 seconds. The same thing takes a flick of the wrist on an iPod.

Janking out the headphones pauses iPods, and eventually shuts them down, this is an easy way to shut down an iPod even when the player is locked; on the Sony, the music goes on playing (forever, depending on the play mode) and wears down the battery, turning the player off requires you to disable the lock. There also does not seem to be a way to set the player to shut down in 15/30/60 minutes, which is such a stunning oversight that I still hope to find it buried in some sub menu.

The whole interface isn't streamlined, the selection of options available in the "context" menu seem fairly random: why are some audio "enhancement" options available but not others? And more isn't always better: you've got a complex equaliser and three (I think) sound enhancers; you need a manual to know which is which (no context help is available on the player itself). And instead of just offering a single "auto play" function, there is intelligent shuffle AND sense me. The latter points are incidental though, easily overlooked if the core functionality wasn't hampered by the lack of an analogue control of any kind.

Awesome piece of kit! quite simply, puts an ipod touch to a shame with its sound quality totally amazing. originally ear phones may not be as effective but try alternative. the hardest part is taking off the ear phone once you are listening to the music!

Light weight, superb sound, very good music settings, i.e pop etc. fm radio, handy. software comes this is very also. simple and easy to use

I actually have the 739 model, this is almost identical appart from gold logo instead of red, and it has a noise cancelling function, which in my opinion, doesnt do much. Like previously said, I also am very disapointed by not being able to make playlists within the player its self, and also lack of a sleep timer to switch it off. I found that the easiest way to make playlists was to sync the player with my laptop, but using guest account, so that what is on the player is exactly the same as what is on the music library (WMP). Its a bit long winded and takes up more of your laptop memory, but seemed the only way.
These two minus points really spoil, what would otherwise be a faultless Mp3 player, and far better than any ipod, but I have to say now, that if I had known it was lacking these functions (i assumed too much of it) i would have opted to by the ipod instead, although the music sound quality is very good.