Sony NWE395/R 16GB Walkman MP3 Player (Red)

It is like the Playstation 3 controller being compared with the Playstation 4 controller. This feels more fragile than the previous model, but it is lighter and brings upgrades that are just as subtle as the PS4 controller's. The plastic is different, hence the different feel, and actually may be the same as the PS4 Controller plastic. The controls are different: Volume and Hold buttons are now individual. The menu navigation has slight changes in a way that would annoy someone who had the previous model, but once you are used to it, or if you have never had one of these, you won't care at all. It runs fairly smoothly so far, but I have not loaded my own music yet(The 5 free tracks were never mentioned on the other reviews). These are preliminary observations mind you, but another thing I like is that there is a simple "Bass Boost" now which is set to "On" out of the box. I suck at Equalizers. I don't really understand what the flip I am doing with them so on the last model I was never able to use the features it had properly. It had different presets which mostly sounded the same, but had the option of saving 3 custom settings. Let me tell you, if all you want is a little more bass for your Miles Davis or Vera Lynn tracks, you won't give a toss about any of this. I am aware that had I not kept my previous one in the car it would still work today and maybe it wouldn't have had the multiple software lockups, which I must say happened with the iPod Nano 3, although much less. Someone stole it. That was the last Apple product I was impressed by....but I digress. This is as simple as you can get while still maintaining quality, and also it comes with 5 free songs, by artists you may not recognize, but free music better than what you would have gotten with your latest Windows Operating System.In summary they may have over reached themselves in some ways with the controls, but in most ways this is less annoying than the previous one, simplifying by giving a button one task. While it is more expensive than the some of the stuff listed it is what it is. A specialist that does specific things, and does them all well.

I loved this player. My husband bought it for me as a gift. I used it for over a year. I found it much easier to use than my ipod. The battery life was real good. The menu is easy to use. It was also easy to add music to the player. I used it a lot until he got it wet and it would not work any more. It held a lot of songs. I have a large collection and was able to put it on this player. I loved the sound with earbuds. Great quality.

I bought this one based on a review I read stating this was the best one on the market (2019 list). I had an iPod mini that died and needed a replacement. I purchased the 16Gb version in Red. It came perfectly packaged, looks nice, is a bit smaller than I expected (but that's good - too many players are larger than need be). The housing is finger print resistant plastic and looks durable. The weight is a bit disappointing in that it is so light, it feels cheap. The control clicks also feel inexpensive and that they will eventually fail (lots of play in them when you click).The specs state that it is able to support about 4000 songs. I thought this is great, just what I needed to transfer my CDs to the player. However, after transferring 961 songs, the system had used almost 10.5 GB of space. I thought that was weird since my iPod had lots of space left with more than 1100 songs. The instructions on how to use and which software to use is really bad - high level information only, not a lot of details. I read several articles about this player (some even from Sony) saying to use the Media Go application (Windows 10). Do NOT USE THIS APPLICATION. It will not work. The application is similar to the Apple iTunes in layout, use and interface. However, its use is not intuitive and any playlists you create will NOT be transferred to the player. I tried about a dozen times and used several different processes. I read on line info on potential problems before finally giving up and downloading the Music Center for PC application. Its interface is not as slick, but it definitely transfers playlists to the player without issue.I'm disappointed that the playlists take up so much room. As someone who is familiar with writing programs, I see no reason why this player should require so much memory for a list of songs. I had 5 playlists with about 400 total songs among them. It requires almost 4 GB of space. WHAT???? It's just a list. It appears that the player requires more than just a list to play from (Playlist) and duplicates a lot more information. Not sure what it's doing behind the scene, but in the end I was only able to use about 10 GB of memory for songs and 4.5 for the lists. That's way dumb.When selecting a list on this player, it takes a long time (depending on the number of songs in the list) to open. Not like the iPod which opens immediately. It almost seems the player has crashed. But Sony's web site states this is normal. Again, bad design Sony - especially if you know this ahead of time and put it on your web site as normal.The sound is very clear and without distortion. It has a decent slider bar equalizer section for a player. The screen is a bit grainy since it doesn't have a high resolution screen. Sort of like the old time hand held gaming systems. There's no excuse for that these days. I had to get a magnifying glass to read the word "Full" in the battery icon because it looked weird and I thought it was defective since all the pixels didn't light up. Only to find there's a word in there.Navigation screens are easy and work well. Power output to external speakers is weak. When I hooked it up to my BOSE player, I had to turn both the player and the Bose system to full volume just to have a decent sound volume. If I had done that with my iPod, it would be blasting out the neighbors. This isn't true of the earphones though. There is definitely enough power to handle earphones very well.In conclusion, I wanted a new player that didn't require Apple's proprietary files and system. I lost many songs because of that in the past. I wanted something like the old Windows Zune system with drag and drop from my PC's file management window. I paid $85 (product, taxes, shipping) for this. Given the limitations of the screen resolution and the huge hit in memory by the playlists, I probably wouldn't buy this again - probably would go back to Apple despite the issues I have with them. It's only a few dozen dollars more, but will last for years and years. But this replacement will not be my main player and I only use it at the beach/traveling where I could lose it. So for now, it's good enough.

These are very small and very effective. I bought several for different genre of music and my audio.They are discontinued, but I did find some of them.I used them when I am going for my walks and when I am traveling.They are very light and good quality. Thanks Sony.

I far prefer an MP3 player for my commuter music and lecture collection - this does the job so well that I have bought two more to have in reserve when my current one dies of old age (which at 5+ years of daily use has not happened yet ...) It's VERY small, the sound quality (through my very good in-ear speaker buds) is excellent. The interface is a little clunky, and I wish it had a better bookmark function, but it works adequately well.