December 24th, 2007Review Of the Sony NWZ-B105F Flash Player
Manufacturer: Sony
Battery life: 12
Audio formats: MP3, WMA
Category: Flash Player
Storage Capacity: 2 GB
Storage Type: Flash
There will for all time be a place in the world for a small, affordable, durable, intuitive MP3 player with immense sound quality–witness Sony’s gym-worthy NWZ-B100F series? Obtainable in 1GB and 2GB capacities, the NWZ-B100F is an ideal choice for anyone looks for an ultra compact player with outstanding sound.
Performance
The NWZ-B100F may be one of Sony’s least costly MP3 players, but it’s no slouch on sound excellence. In fact, the only MP3 player in this price range that can match the NWZ-B100F’s sound quality is the Creative Zen V Plus. While the NWZ-B100F lacks many of the audio improvement features found on higher-end models such as the NWZ-S610 or NWZ-A810, its out-of-the-box fidelity is much improved and more malleable than players like the SanDisk Sansa m200 or SanDisk Sansa Express, which are similar in price and features.
The NWZ-B100F’s FM radio is easy to use and capable of picking up all the major stations we typically receive at our office. The automatic preset function is disappointing, though, because it populated 20 of our 30 station presets with transmissions that were mostly static. Fortunately, manually adding presets is as easy as pressing and holding the engage in recreation button once you’ve located a station worth saving. Making recordings from the NWZ-B100F’s FM radio is equally simple: just find an FM broadcast you want to save and then press the red record button on the top-left edge of the player to put away recordings as MP3 files. The FM recording sounds excellent make available that the incoming station is clear and the recording resolution is set to at least 128Kbps. The NWZ-B100F’s built-in voice recorder is also easy to use and provides polite results when kept inside arm’s length; or else the recording tends to get loud.
Design
The Sony NWZ-B100F series looks like a high-tech cigarette lighter. Its least 3.creep by 1-inch by 0.5-inch form fits contentedly in a closed fist, ideal for a morning jog. In fact, the NWZ-B100F has all the markings of a machine designed with an athletic user in mind. Each of the device’s eight buttons is bodily unforgettable from one another by shape, size, or feel, letting you work the NWZ-B100F without looking at it. The player’s oversize hold control lets even the nearly all and sundry abstracted user easily disable the player’s controls, and a metal-reinforced loophole directly beside the hold switch accepts a lanyard (sold unconnectedly).
One of our favorite NWZ-B100F design features is the built-in USB plug that lets you connect the player to any computer’s USB port without a cable. A removable cap hides the USB connector and even though it’s easy to be unable to find, the cap stays firmly on, thanks to internal metal reinforcement. Our least favorite design feature is the squinty, 1-inch by 0.25-inch OLED screen, which displays three look of microscopic blue text on a black background. The text is crisp and neat, but it’s nowhere near as legible as text on the iPod Nano or the Creative Zen alongside Plus. Fortunately, Sony’s ergonomic controls make in repair the NWZ-B100F a cinch, without having to orientation the screen for direction-finding cues.
Features
The Sony NWZ-B100F is the Cadillac of under-$80 fitness MP3 players. While workout-worthy competitor such as the SanDisk Sansa state or the Creative Zen Nano Plus transport like features for less, the NWZ-B100F serves up a feast of features, design, and sound superiority.
Until recently, all Sony MP3 players suffered the fatal flaw of Sony’s miserably unusable SonicStage software. But Sony has unshackled its latest batch of MP3 players, including the NWZ-S610 as well as NWZ-A810, allowing customers to use popular software options such as window Media Player or Rhapsody to organize and transfer music. since you can attach the NWZ-B100F to a computer using a generic UMS mode for exhausted and dropping files, even Mac and Linux users can take advantage of this little dynamo.
While the NWZ-B100F’s microscopic screen doesn’t present photo or video support, its audio playback, FM tuner, FM recorder, and voice recorder still provide great value. Audio playback supports MP3 and WMA, as fighting fit as purchased and subscription WMA files from Rhapsody, Napster, or Yahoo Music infinite.
Contrast to other Sony MP3 players, the NWZ-B100F doesn’t offer many bells and screech. The main menu presents four icons: voice recording; music library; FM; and settings. The settings menu is similarly sparse, allowing you to tweak music playback mode, add EQ, automatically populate the 30 FM radio presets, alter recording quality (all recordings are made as MP3 files up to 192Kbps), and set a maximum volume limit. While Sony MP3 players are usually an EQ-twiddlers playground, the NWZ-B100F is glow on acoustic enhancement option, but does offer five useful presets and an editable 5-band EQ with three degrees of cut or boost control.
After scratching the surface, we were happy to find that the NWZ-B100F’s music player offers more than get jointly the eye. For example, the music library menu makes liberal use of the ID3 tag in order embedded inside your music collection, allowing you to sort your music not just by performer, album, song, or genre, but by release date as well. (Hello instant ’80s mix!) For those who prefer in the direction of sort their music into their own systematically prepared series of folders, the Sony NWZ-B100F lets you bypass ID3 tag sorting (which can wreak havoc on classical music collections) and instead browse by folder. The NWZ-B100F also supports playlists, although there’s no ability to create playlists on the go. Podcast fans will be disappointed that the NWZ-B100F does not offer support for bookmarking long files or automatically resuming playback on files such as audiobooks, which often need to be digested in small doses.
Having seen what features Sony was able to cram into their similarly sized NW-S700F MP3 player, we were a little disappointed that the NWZ-B100F leaves out additional gym-friendly features such as a stopwatch, alarm, or countdown timer. At this price, however, we’re willing to look past the omissions
Battery life, usually a strong suit for Sony, is surprisingly average on the B100. Sony rates the NWZ-B100F’s battery life at around 12 hours, but we’ll update this review as soon as our CNET Labs battery test results are available. Even at 12 hours, the NWZ-B100F should be able to get you through a week’s worth of workouts without any problem.
