13-Year-Old Trades iPod For a Walkman For a Week

BBC Magazine convinced 13-year-old Scott Campbell to trade in his iPod for a Walkman for a week and see what he thought. Scott thinks the iPod wins when it comes to sound quality, color, weight, and the shuffle feature. The Walkman, however, offers two headphone sockets, making it much easier to listen to music with a friend. My favorite part of the review is, "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."

Comments

Different kind of iPod/Walkman switch

[moonbender]

I switched from an aging iPod mini to a Sony S638F "walkman", more or less the Sony high-end equivalent of an iPod nano 8GB. I'm not happy. I bought it because the sound quality is superior to the Apple players, and I'm willing to believe that it is. However, the interface is just awful. The scroll wheel is an incredibly awesome interface for things like changing the volume and particularly for skipping withing songs/audio lectures/podcasts. But even apart from that, Sony made so many stupid interface mistakes which are inexcusable for a premium product that's not really cheaper than an iPod.

For instance, there is no sleep timer. There is a clock, which can be accessed cumbersomely and which "pops up" every 10 seconds or so, which means if you want the time all you got to do is take out the player... and stare at it for an average of 5 seconds; what a joke. Apart from that, there is no way to make any use of the clock. You can't use it to wake up at a specific time, you can't use it to shutdown at a certain time, not even "in X minutes". Another thing is that iPods pause when you remove the headphones. Even when locked, you can get your iPod to shut down simply by yanking out the headphones. The Sony player doesn't do this, AND it doesn't have a sleep timer, which means if I fall asleep listening to music chances are it's still running when I wake up, with 20% of the battery gone.

And there are so many more annoyances. For instance, the player has a 4-way control on the front (and an additional 2 way control for volume on the side). In the main playback mode, in other words in the mode people are spending 90% of their time in, the up/down action of the 4-way control is basically useless. You can use it to navigate the library, but not in a very useful way, and certainly not in a way that's important enough to waste a central part of the user interface on.

More? Ok. To find out how long the currently playing song is you have to press OPTION, scroll down 5 times to the "Detailed Informa..." entry, open it and then it displays a pop-up with the song length.