Sony Walkman NWZ-Z1060 review

Sony’s new Walkman is a chunky Android-based MP3 player with 32GB internal storage and a 4.3in QVGA (800×480) screen. It has similar battery life to most Android phones and managed to keep playing audio for 22 hours and video for almost six and a half in our tests.

The Walkman is big enough to use for comfortable mini-tablet style gaming and movie watching, but it’s a bit of a squeeze if you want to stuff it into your jeans pocket. It has a snazzy coloured back, although this proved to be slightly prone to scratching. Tinny – but surprisingly loud – little speakers on the rear allow you to share your impeccable musical taste with fellow bus commuters, too. For some unknown reason, Sony has seen fit to use a proprietary USB cable, which means you’ll either have to buy extras or cart your only cable everywhere with you. We’d have been much happier with the same standard micro USB port found on every other Android device. The Walkman also has a mini HDMI port, so you can connect it to a TV if you want to watch videos on a bigger screen.

The MP3 player comes installed with Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread), rather than Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich), which is a bit of a disappointment, but the player’s 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor – although it’s getting on a bit – is powerful enough to make Sony’s launcher interface run smoothly. The supplied music app is easy to use and has some cool features, such as a mood analyser, but you can’t search through track names and its format support isn’t great – it can handle AAC, MP3, WAV and WMA files, but we had to install Winamp to play our OGG files and AndLess to play FLAC content. Similarly, if you want to play Audible’s proprietary AU format audiobooks, you’ll have to download a dedicated app. The joy of Android, of course, is that installing these apps is easy to do.

The Walkman’s sound quality is excellent. That’s par for the course – modern phones and MP3 players generally have high quality DACs. The default settings of Sony’s own music app are fairly flat and well balanced, with a slight bass emphasis. There are also plenty of other settings you can apply to normalise track volumes, change the EQ balance and compensate for the effect of dynamic range compression during the music production process. However, we slightly preferred the audio characteristics and settings built into the free Winamp player – the choice is up to you, as you can install any Android audio app you want. If you use the Walkman button on the side of the player to wake up the player’s screen, it will jump straight to the Sony music player app; waking the Walkman with the power button at the top of the device will take you straight to whichever app you’re currently using.

The supplied earplug-style headphones are among the best you’ll get with an MP3 player, but we found them a touch boomy and bass-heavy for our taste. This made it harder to pick out detail in the mid and treble ranges. Fans of more balanced audio are advised to upgrade to headphones such as the Soundmagic E10 earplug style set.

Not everyone’s interested in gaming on their mobile device, but Android’s developers have packed the Google Play store with plenty of top notch casual games. The large 4.3in screen really lends itself to cult construction title Minecraft, Sentinel III – our favourite tower defence strategy game – and board game conversions such as Catan, making it easy to see and control your games. The Z1060 is also powerful enough to play processor-intensive 3D action games such as Captain America, making this a good buy for those who want their MP3 player to serve double duty as a handheld games console. There’s a huge 1GB of internal storage for apps.

The Walkman is also good for films, with support for a wide variety of video formats including H.264 MP4 fles, WMV, Quicktime MOV, XviD and more. Not all our test files worked, and some of the less standard resolutions didn’t adjust properly to the screen size, but the vast majority played without a hitch. Sony’s own video player app didn’t work with all our test files, but the Walkman still has Android’s integrated video player, so when we added a file manager app and browsed to our video directory, we could play almost everything. Adding a third party app such as MX Player meant that we could even play even unusual formats such as MKV, although the challenge of decoding our high resolution MKV videos lead to slowdown and lag.

Regardless of what application you use, the Walkman is an excellent video player. The screen can’t rival the high-resolution “retina” displays of recent Apple devices, but it’s nonetheless an excellent display. Our photos and videos looked great, with even lighting and intense colours that made them particularly easy to watch at this relatively small size. The glossy screen tends to pick up smears and fingerprints, but no more so than other touchscreen devices.

At £275, the Walkman costs around £70 more than a 32GB 4th Generation Apple iPod Touch, which has a 960×640 display and a massive battery capable of providing over 48 hours’ audio playback and almost 8 hours of video. However, the iPod is seriously limited by being tied to iTunes and its store. Although you can get third party video and audio player software that allows you to escape the iPod’s very limited range of supported formats, the iPod doesn’t make your life easy.

If you want to be able to play as much of your media collection as possible on a single device and access online content which requires Flash, the Walkman NWZ-Z1060 is the high-end media player for you, despite odd niggles such as a its proprietary connector. However, most users will do better with the lower price and higher display resolution of its iOS rival or an Android phone with a large screen and battery, such as the Motorola RAZR MAXX.