Sony Vaio Pocket VGF-AP1 Review

Overall Rating

Battery Life, Screen, Sound quality, Capacity, Style, Touchpad, remote, sturdiness.

Sonicstage. No playlist from PC to player. Playing one artist, includes tracks not only by the artist but all tracks on albums where the artist is featured.

I bought this from Dixons after much searching. In fact, I bought an Ipod mini for my wife, so I have some experience of both brands.
For those who love their music quality and want some style this machine is a great choice.
1. It is a 40GB player - you will struggle to get 40GB for £199 anywhere else (even if it is being discontinued.)
2. The screen is ace, and displays almost all the information you could ever want to see of any track i.e. The track title, The Album cover, The Artist, The sequence number of the track (1 of 11 of an album or 211 of 9880 if you are just playing randomly from tracks on the machine), The elapsed time, The track length, and a graphic of how far along in the track you are, The current time, The battery life, That is a lot of information to put on one screen.
3. Browsing is made easy. When displaying albums. It displays the artist if the album has one artist. When searching the track, it displays the artist as well.
4. The sound quality is excellent, and there is EQ management.
5. The cradle is a boon. It keeps the machine protected and sturdy, and provides drop in and out when connected to either the PC or stereo equipment.
6. Navigation is simple once learned. Same with ipod, you have to learn it first.
7. Robust build quality.
8. Battery life is excellent. I get at least 20 hours. (That is with a mix of Atrac3+ (64kbps)and mp3(192kbps) files). Every review I have seen quotes 20 as the minimum so I am amazed that a previous reviewer quotes 5 hrs. Maybe they have a battery that is faulty.
9. The searching mechanism, (with the firmware upgrade,) means I can search through 9600 tracks in about a minute, just by keeping my finger on a button. this is impressive.
I have had to reset it twice, (or thrice) I think, but on the whole it is an absolutley excellent machine and well worth the money.
It is let down by the software - Sonicstage - which must be used to manage the music on the player.
Sonicstage is not terrible in it's functionality, but in it's operation (although there are some real holes e.g. not being able to create playlists on the PC, and transfer them to the player without re-transferring the tracks). It holds up the PC it works on and is generally slow. Once the music is on the player however, you are free and can enjoy it.
With the firmware upgrade, you no longer need to convert mp3 files to Atrac. They just copy directly onto the player.
It uses USB2.03 so is very fast.
I love it! I have 9882 tracks on mine, and have nearly 5GB left. This is in addition to hundreds of pictures.

I thoroughly recommend this piece of Kit.

Members' Comments oniyare's Review

• neilbradburn on 10th Jan 2006

  This is a question not comment. How long does it generally take to upload an mp3 file to the player with the new firmware and transfer software? I bought a player which I had to return due to a dead battery, but my experience with it was that it took a few seconds for each track to transfer, which meant it took a good 25 minutes just to get around 30 albums on. Also, I never tried Sonicstage, so would appreciate your comments on its stability.
  
  Many thanks.
  -Neil