Positioned as direct competitor to the iPod Touch, the Sony X-Series Walkman is a high-end music player that has the potential to best every other device in its class. Does it succeed and will consumers take to it like they did with the iPod?
Carrying a hefty price, it’s not unusual to have high expectations for the X-Series. Fortunately, Sony created a gadget that’s worth its weight in dollars, managing a performance that lives up to its promise. Audio quality is excellent, with an easily-noticeable higher quality than many handheld MP3 players in the market (iPod Touch included) with built-in noise canceling.
It offers a bevy of sound enhancement options that allow you to tweak the audio to your liking. Based on trying out a bunch of stuff, though, the default setting (flat EQ, no enhancements) remains my favorite. Overall audio quality, in my opinion, is even better than the superior S-Series Walkman, making it equally capable plugged into a speaker as it does on a pair of cans.
Physically, the X-Series is a gorgeous piece of hardware, with a pocket-friendly frame (although slightly larger than the iPod Touch) and a 3-inch OLED display. Sony went all-out on the UI, creating an intuitive and fun front-end.
Feature set is pretty decent, which includes Wi-Fi connectivity, onboard Slacker app, full HTML browsing and YouTube support. It’s no iPod Touch on this end (especially with the Touch’s App Store support), but it offers quite a good bundle. Media support includes the usual audio suspects (with DRM support), along with AVC (H.264/AVC), WMV, and MPEG-4 video capabilities. It can also handle various image and text-based formats.
Overall, the Sony X-Series Walkman produced an expensive but considerably worthy piece of equipment. It retails around the same vicinity as the iPod Touch and offers arguably better performance. However, the Touch has become more than a music player now (with the extensibility afforded by the App Store) and the X-Series just pales when set under that light.
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