Sony in all its goodness and quality, has long topped the tables in personal audio since the great years of the 1980's when the first personal/portable tape player was invented. Although recently the Walkman brand has been knocked off its throne by Apple's popular Ipod. Though the Ipod may reign supreme these days, Sony has created another nifty gadget The Sony NW-E507.

The NW-E507 is a small sized mp3 player about the size of a pack of gum. It also looks nice too, having a cool shiney screen/surface that would get some interest from other people. If you see this mp3 player in the picture it looks pretty cool and it comes in lots of colours too [i got gold]. The battery life on this is so good you will tell the world and come back and its still playing music. Sometimes I listen to it when I go to sleep and find it still playing when i go to sleep the next day and its still got a quarter or third left. The outstanding battery life is because of its Lithium ION battery and the OLED screen which uses less energy aparantly than normal LED screens. However...this leads to one of this mp3 player's problems...you can barely see whats on the screen when you are outside or in direct light, which is annoying you look like a retard having to crouch over it so you can see some decent words. Sound quality is stellar in this one if you plop in some good quality headphones you can hear a crisp clear sound with great bass. If you don't want to listen to your tunes you could even play music from your favourite radio station. Yes this is common nowadays but in this mp3 player it plays nice a smooth and plays about as good as the mp3 part does.

Functions for this thing are pretty simple too pick up, in fact you can switch songs with one hand. To switch song you flick the stick thing forward abit and back to go previous song or start of the song, to switch playlist/groups you pull the stick bit out abit more and up and down for next and back...and finally push the stick thing in abit more and it goes into a hold/lock state where the stick thing is locked in position so you can't accidentally switch song. Other than that controls are straight forward: there is a menu button, volume buttons, repeat mode buttons and other straight forward stuff. This mp3 player doesn't have an on and off switch...which you think is a bad thing but really its not because just stopping the song turns it off so it wont keep the screen on for the rest of the day until the battery runs out. There are also some features that you would expect from other mp3 players would have such as bass and treble balance etc.

This Sony Walkman model comes with: Headphones, Carrying pouch, extension headphone cord, usb cable, waistband clip, software cd and yes you knew it the player itself. The Headphones are average quality not the best but are pretty short and can barely reach your head without the extension cord which isn't even that long for a headphone extension cord. The waistband clip is not really efficient in its job, it's plastic doesnt feel cheap but doesnt really help hold well on your waistband of your pants and its not that hard to fall off because it doesnt grip tight enough. The software provided Sonicstage has been known for it's hard interface from some people, but i found it was relatively easy to use and gets the job done fairly well. The Usb cord thankfully is a mini usb cord so if you lose it there will be one lying around the house or can be replaced for like 2-5 bucks. And last but not least the carrying pouch is a soft cloth bag thing which feels abit big for the player to my tastes but you dont need one because the mp3 player is small enough anyway.

The bad things I found were that this sony walkman mp3 player was that it had slower file transfering speed...i'm not actually sure if it is usb 2.0 so putting on songs is pretty slow, the screen is too week in the daylight, the screen scratches easily, the belt clip is pretty useless and that sometimes only if you have alot of songs scrolling through them takes a while [although you can search by artist etc]. But its a good mp3 player overall

The Sony NW-E507 [or Sony core] is a great mp3 player it mixes with nice design with great sound quality and battery-life. Even now in 2008 which is like uhh 3 years from when i got it people think its pretty cool. Although its not perfect everyone makes mistakes, and this is a great mp3 player and I recommend it.

The Good
Great Sound Quality
Super long Battery Life
Good FM radio

The Bad
Easily scratchable screen
Hard to see screen in low-light
useless belt clip