Sony Walkman NWZ-S718
Review by Robert Young-Pullman | Published May 2008 | Review Archives

Believe it or not, Sony is still making Walkmans. Really! And they're not even meant for the hipster crowd (see my review of the Lasonic modern boombox). These might not be waterproof like the flagship Walkmans of the 1980s, but they at least are a bit sleeker than their construction-tape yellow forbearers.

But check this out - not only is the Walkman NWZ a huge leap forward for Sony, but it will almost definitely kick the butt of the Apple mp3 player in a similar price range, the iPod Nano. The basic model features 4 GB of hard disk space for $149, but that's really too small these days and the 8 GB model is only $50 more. The half-inch thick body feels a little bulkier compared to the Nano, but the Walkman isn't nearly as wide. The battery life is also a dream - it lasts much longer than the iPod Nano.

But here's where the Walkman really kills Apple's baby: this is probably the first mass-marketed mp3 player built with the sound enthusiast in mind. The Walkman has a five-band EQ, Clear Stereo processing, Clear Bass boost, hi-freq restoration, virtual surround-a-sound and dynamic normalization. And the Walkman takes advantage of one of the best new technologies emerging today: noise-cancellation. Included with the Walkman are proprietary headphones that block outside sound and are also embedded with tiny microphones measure the atmospheric noise and adjust the volume (if you select that option) to cancel out all outside noise. It's really remarkable to experience it for the first time. Just walking from the El stop to my office involves quite a change in noise-level, but the Walkman adjusted without me doing a thing (noise-cancellation takes a chunk out of the vaunted 33 hours of battery life, however). Every mp3 player will do this someday - here's one of the first.