Review: NW-S706F Digital Music Player

A modest name for the player introducing new technology in its segment. Released - and bought in Tokyo (-: - in four colours to the Japanese market on October 21st, the player has the following features:

• noise canceling
  
• 1 to 4 GB flash storage
• colour display
• Li-ion battery
  
• neck strap
  
• ships with SonicStage 4.1 CP (native MP3/WMA/AAC/ATRAC3 support)
• a FM radio (who will use this anyway, DAB is just around the corner..)
  

After some weeks of usage, I'm very happy with it. The SonicStage software remains the cumbersome part; importing cover art from the web is still a semi-manual process and for reasons unknown to me, some pics get transferred to the player while others do not.



The internal battery is charged over USB and lasts well a week, with activated noise canceling - Don't expect miracles out of this feature. It's doing a good job to render low frequency background-noise away, yet fails on short mid- to high-frequencies. A plus when commuting by train, plane or listening to music when vacuumcleaning - As the Sony commercial states, every moment has its music...

The design is an eye-catcher for sure, as the display virtually disappears when shut off. If you don't care so much for battery life, you can let some nice coloured dots fly to the rhythm of your music.