Whine whine whine, that’s all I seem to be doing lately. Anyway…
Ok, I bought this very cool looking Sony MP3 player from Foto Cats in Sandton City shopping centre. It’s cheap — R1400.00 for 20GB — and it looks great. It even works great. Good sound, quick (once you upgrade the firmware). Only annoying feature is that it only plays tracks in Sony’s proprietary sound format, but converting and transferring is seamless.
However, after a week, the unit stopped working completely. Wouldn’t turn on, just hangs at the startup screen. Rewind. Return to Foto Cats. Get a new unit. 1 week later, same story. Rewind. Refund. Goodbye Sony Walkman.
The unit has a lot of potential, but unfortunately the software (or hardware, who knows?) is flawed. I notice Sony.com don’t even advertise the 20GB unit, so maybe they’ve dumped all this defective junk on the developing world. I dunno. But don’t buy this fucker. Seriously.
Now I have to find another MP3 player that won’t force me into some DRM nightmare…
Jarred Cinman 
wow? really? I’ve had this mp3 for over a year now and I’ve never had a problem with it.
Yeah, but there’s all kinds of crazy nonsense with an iPod. Serial codes that lock it to specific machines for synchronisation, and it’s own proprietary audio formats. Plus the DRM devil must be resisted on principle – what they are starting here will balloon into something we will never be able to reverse. I don’t look forward to having to install licenses onto my mouse to play video files…
im amazed that you bought this
i mean – the iPod (which i thought was a transient technology) is everything you need
the drm also took me by surprise off itunes – but luckily we (in sa) cant buy off the ipod site