We were sent a Sony Walkman E450 to trial, but we didn't get to keep it
Just after Christmas Sony were kind enough to send me and Top Ender a Sony Walkman E450 to try out for a few days. When it came Top Ender was most upset that it was the blue version and not the pink one she had seen online. I reminded her it could be worse as they could of sent one of the other colours (Red, Green Black) and that it didn't really matter what colour as they all work the same!
I set about connecting it up to my Sony Vaio laptop and was slightly confused when it told me that I had disrupted it's connection when I hadn't been near it (Top Ender and Baby Boy hadn't either) and was already writing up a negative review in my head when I thought sod it I'll just start using it. I unplugged it and started listening to some of the tracks that were on the E450. There was nothing I recognised, but I loved that I could change the pitch of the music and started making use of the Karaoke function after listening to the songs for a bit. I don't really understand how it does it, but the E450 changes the audio settings so that the vocals are quieter and the backing track at a normal level meaning that Personal Karaoke is a lot of fun.
The only downside on this Karaoke function is that Daddy and I currently spend an awful lot of time telling Top Ender that when she is listening to music through her headphones that we don't really want to hear her singing along with it (especially when it is Justin Bieber or Hannah Montana!)
Daddy let me know that it played MP3, WMA and WAV files, but as he is the one normally in charge of putting tunes on to the various devices in our house that didn't mean a lot to me. He also said that if I wished I could put lyrics on in .lrc format, but I wouldn't know where to even look for those!
Top Ender has an ipod Nano and the layout of the Sony E450 was pretty similar, so we were both able to work out what we needed to do/what menu's to open to do what we wanted. In other words it was very simple to navigate and didn't confuse me (which is easily done). They were about the same size and weight, but I did feel that I was going to lose the Sony E450 down the back of the sofa as it kept slipping out of my pocket, something my ipod touch doesn't do mainly because of it's size!
The Sony Walkman E450 has a nice little 2inch screen, (204x320 pixels says Daddy) on which if you wanted you can watch video (again Daddy told me it supports H.264/AVC, WMV and Mpeg-4 all of which mean nothing to me) but to be honest I don't think even Top Ender has the eyesight to watch video's on the screen for a long amount of time.
I did find the FM radio tuner and voice recorder quite useful, and left myself lots of little notes and was able to listen to Pop Master on Radio 2 without Baby Boy shouting at me for daring to turn off the constant music we normally listen to. I also found the alarm clock quite useful for making sure that I got to school on time to pick up Top Ender and the timer was great fun for seeing how long it really did take Top Ender to get changed or eat her dinner.
Overall I did like the Sony E450 and if I were in the market for a replacement music device for Top Ender this would definitely be on the short list. A quick search found the E453 (4GB) for sale at around £50, the E454 (8GB) for around £70 and E455 (16GB) for around £90 (but they were all from stores I had never heard of before!) and I think that it's actually quite good value.
