Sony Walkman NW-S718F

The real selling point of the player is its excellent sound quality, which, paradoxically, can be fully realized only with an upgraded pair of earphones.

This Walkman produces some of the roundest bass it have heard on a player, which helps overshadow shortcomings like mediocre video file support and a user interface that could stand a little sprucing up.

It's not a musical masterpiece, but there's nothing to dislike about the NWZ-S718F it's a solid performer with the unique ability to lower ambient noise.

Let's talk about nomenclature for a second. Sony loves to give long, boring names to each of its devices if it's black rather than red, it gets a different model number.

This player is the NWZ-S718F, but it belongs to the NWZ-S710F series. The 3.2 by 1.6 by 0.5 inch player is tiny enough to be considered a viable competitor of the iPod Nano. Its 1.8 inch, 320 by 240 pixel display is bright, sharp, and customizable, in that video and photos can be shifted from the default vertical position to horizontal left and horizontal right.

The front face of the player is a little too cluttered for my taste four arrow buttons, a central Play/Pause button, and two more buttons above them (Home/Back and Power/Option). There's a proprietary connector, so you have to use the supplied cable to connect the player to your PC. And although the headphone jack is designed for the included noise canceling earphones.

It accepts standard 3.5mm headphones. Earphones are much higher quality than the standard ear bud fare that comes with most players. Unlike ear buds, which sit outside the ear canal and don't create a seal, they actually go into your ear, and they sound good.

File support is not extensive. Having AAC, MP3, WMA, and WAV is acceptable for audio, but providing only MPEG-4 SP (simple profile) for video and JPEG for photos may be limiting: You'll probably have to convert most of your files to make them viewable on the player.