Sony HD3 v Ipod
Well, I've had the blue mini ipod for 12 months now, and have been pretty pleased with it in that time.
The HD3 has just arrived though, and with the 30 hours battery life, 20gb hard disk, all format compatibility and classy looks, I had to get hold of one.
My main gripe with the mini ipod was the battery life; 8 hours. Now, this in itself isn't a huge problem. I use it on the train on the way to work, on the way home, and during the day to alleviate the office boredom, charging it over night. The trouble with it only being 8 hours (at best, when new) is that once you replace the junk headphones they supply for some proper ones, and turn on the equaliser (essential) the battery life is down to about 5 hours, which would barely get you through the departure lounge these days let alone across the Atlantic. Even then, the sound quality isn't on par with some other music players.
The HD3 gives a good 30 hours of battery life. Once you've added better headphones and the digital qualiser, you're still looking at clear over 25 hours of music…plenty enough to take you on most journeys or weekends away.
Sound quality is where the Sony wins though, and you would expect it to be so. They've been in this game for a very long time, and this unit doesn't disappoint…once the EQ is turned on!
The sound quality is far superior to the Ipod.
Its not all perfect though. Apple make things look good, and work well. The interface on the Ipod is much better than the clunky Sony. iTunes is better than Sonic Stage, although the Atrac-3 format at 256kbps is excellent for the file size.
When you consider how the interface is inferior to the Ipod, it's even more disappointing therefore to find that there is no remote included with the Sony...Well, not in the UK. Same old story here; Release everything a year later than the rest of the world, take as much out of the box as you can get away with, and double the price.
It's not even easy to get hold of the 3-line remote that will give you full access to all the features of the HD3 on the wire. As 'luck' would have it, any Sony remote will function with the HD3, but only the most recent MD remotes have a display that is compatible. The lack of remote on the Ipod was never a problem with the simple interface, but it is a serious annoyance with the Sony.
The last main feature missing is the playlist functionality from the Ipod. Apple got this 100% correct, even if their version of random is not random at all! To create an equivalent playlist on the Sony, you need to use groups within Sonic Stage. These are ok, because you can still use the HD3 to play by album, genre or artist, but if you want the same track in more than one group (playlist) then you need to copy it, which means having two separate identical files stored on the disk. There is a favourites/bookmarks function, but that only seems to hold 100 tracks, which in reality is plenty, but its like limiting you to one Apple playlist with a maximum 100 track limit!
Overall, I'm very happy with the Sony. Both sit on my desk, but its the Sony that comes to work with me everyday. It has its faults, but the sound quality and the battery life is what I care about most, and it's for these reasons that the HD3 is the winner for me.
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