The AU$499 Sony Vaio VGF-WA1 is a portable streaming media player with a built-in set of speakers. Could it be the household "ghetto blaster" of the Internet-age?
Design
If reaction from our office is anything to go by, the Sony Vaio VGF-WA1 is a good-looking unit. It certainly looks better than a grey box with a massive speaker grille is meant to -- a lot of this is down to its curved front facade, sharp edges and, of course, the angled high-gloss plastic panel which houses a series of lit up, touch sensitive buttons and a blue monochrome display.
While high on the cool factor, the controls have a downside: the plastic panel was sullied by fingerprints every time we used the unit -- which meant we spent a lot of our time cleaning it -- and when we were carrying it by its rear-mounted flip out grab handle, it often brushed against our thigh, setting off a chain of music-related embarrassment.
There are dedicated pause/play, forward, rewind and volume buttons, in addition to ones for flicking through the menus. It's a real wonder, then, why we weren't allowed to pause or skip tracks unless we were in the Now Playing or track selection screens. Searching through large lists of artists, songs or Web radio stations was a tedious task because holding the up and down buttons does nothing to increase the scrolling speed. And there's no way of making playlists or saving favourite stations on the unit.
Sony was clearly inspired by Windows 3.1 for its installation software
Features
With the Vaio you can listen to music from a variety of sources: it can stream music wirelessly from a PC or Web radio, play from an MP3 player connected via the auxiliary input or dish up tracks from its own, rather paltry, 128MB of internal memory.
Before you can do anything, though, you'll have to install the Vaio's Media Integrated Server software. Installation was fairly easy but, as we've seen with its Walkman products, Sony really needs to give its bundled software a good spit and polish. Some of the screens on the installer brought back memories of Windows 3.11 (see screen capture on right) and the manual was as friendly as a bouncer when you're wearing "the wrong shoes".
If you don't have a wireless network at home, the WA1 ships with a USB wireless stick so it can connect to your PC, and through it the Internet. We would've liked it if the Vaio supported uPNP (universal plug and play) or NAS (network attached storage), so songs can be streamed straight off network connected hard drives, like the Maxtor Shared Storage Plus, without the need for your PC to be on.
The WA1 also includes a clock and on-timer function. Just don't expect to it be a good replacement for your alarm clock. The clock is only displayed with the WA1 connected to mains power and the on-timer function doesn't ring an alarm of any sort -- indeed it fades in very neatly. In spite of the fact that there are thousands of free stations listed on the Live365 Web site -- which supplies all of the WA1's stations -- only 98 of them could be found by our unit.
Performance
Standing right over the Vaio, its sound quality is actually pretty decent but once you step away to more normal listening distances the quality can best be described as OK. The bass is weak, even with dynamic bass boost switched on, and higher ranges are a bit hollow. If you're planning to use the Vaio in the kitchen or as an adjunct to gardening -- as its packaging suggests -- it should be sufficient. There's also a headphone jack, stereo outputs and even an optical-out port. The quality through these is an improvement on the speaker output although certain background musical details were still difficult to discern, like the birds chirping in the background of The Flaming Lips' My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion.
We were impressed, though, with the Vaio's wireless range; we successfully took our review unit on a tour of the office and even at a distance of up to 50 metres away, and through a series of lifts, bathrooms and servers, the Vaio had no problem communicating with our music server. Its wireless performance even outshone some Draft-N PCMCIA cards we tested earlier this year.
While it's an interesting concept, and not without its merits, we're not entirely sure who's going to fork out nearly AU$500 for the Vaio VGF-WA1. Those looking to play MP3s in the kitchen or the garden are probably better served by the numerous MP3-player specific sound systems available.
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