As might be expected from as style-conscious a company as Sony, the NW-A1200 comes packaged in a sleek purple and black card box.

It’s one of only two that come with a mains charger (the others charge using the PC’s USB connection). It’s also one of two to contain a hard disk, which explains its 8GB capacity, larger (along with the MSI player) than all the other players.

However, like the iPod nano, it’s not possible to simply drag-and-drop music files on to the player using Windows – the SonicStage software has to be installed. The installation wizard refused to work on our test PC, so we had to browse the supplied CD, find the appropriate setup file, and run the installation program directly, after which it worked.

The buttons can be a little tricky to press, as they are small and recessed slightly into the body of the player. The menus are easy to follow, however. The player is a little slower than most of the others, because of using a hard disk rather than flash memory for storage. This takes longer to search through, so there was a slight delay when finding tracks, and similar tasks.

Playback quality was good, and the screen, although it’s only a monochrome green screen, was readable. We noticed a lot of flickering on the screen, though, which may be a problem for some.

It only plays music, not pictures or video, but it has a few nice touches such as an intelligent shuffle mode and the ability to play through favourite songs. There’s also the ability to output a line-out signal through the headphone socket, which means it can play music through unamplified speakers. The supplied earbud headphones were a good quality pair.

This article is part of a group test of portable music players.
See also:
Portable music players
Apple iPod nano
Creative Zen V
Iriver U10
MSI P640
Sandisk Sansa e260
A table of features can be read via our pdf download above.