Sony Walkman NWZ-A829 and Mac OSX

You may go into your local store and the salesperson will tell you that this MP3 video player will not work with your Mac. Though this may be Sony Corp's line, the information is incorrect. Like its smaller cousin, the NWZ-S618, all functions, except for the playlists, work perfectly fine with a Mac.
I have a Powerbook G4. When you plug the player into the computer, it acts just like any USB device. It appears on the desktop and then you can open it and drag and drop I-Tunes generated files into the device. The battery charges while plugged into the Mac.

General
The NWZ-A829 is a mp3 walkman with 14.7 GB of memory. It can also show photos and videos. It is small, about 3.5 inches X 2 inches ( a little smaller than a credit card) and a little less than 3/8 inch thick. It has a decent size 2.4 inch diagonal LCD color screen. The screen takes up about 2/3rd of the front surface so there is only room for two small control buttons and one larger central 'rocker' type key. One of the small keys is like a 'return' key that allows you to get to the menu page. The other small key is the On/Off switch and also lets you open the 'options' menu. The large key is the Play/Stop as well as the Enter key. Rocking it in one direction or another moves the cursor key. There is a volume rocker switch on the side of the unit as well as a Bluetooth button and a Hold switch.
The menu system is very simple and easy to understand. Using the cursor button, you navigate onscreen going from icon to icon choosing Music, Video, Photos, Shuffle , Search, Bluetooth, Playlists and Settings (eq, sound enhancements, screen orientation, etc.) It is almost exactly the same as the system used on the NWZ-Sxxx players.
Made in Malaysia, the body is mostly plastic but feels nicely solid and robust. It comes with earbud headphones (more on these later), a proprietary USB connection wire, a dock adaptor (but no dock) and Windows software, an MP3 conversion tool, Windows Media Player 1.1 and Media Manager.
Battery life is impressive, 36 hours for music and 10 hours for video. Of course raising the screen brightness, using the eq or other sound enhancements or playing in shuffle mode will all lower these numbers.

The Music
This MP3 player is also AAC compatible but copy protected AAC files will not play on the device. All of my music comes from my personal CD collection that was loaded onto I-Tunes and all of these play without a problem. You drag and drop files and folders from your I-Tunes library in Finder (not from I-Tunes itself) into the Music folder in the MP3 player. The cover art is retained.
You can select your music by Song, Album, Artist, Genre and Year.
There is also a Folder selection. On the computer desktop, once you are inside the device's Music folder, you can re-arrange your I-Tunes created folders. So you can change the song order of an album (by changing the numeric song order inside the album folder) and even create albums (by creating a new folder and dropping individual songs into it). These changes will only show up in the Folder selection.
There is a Search option that lets you find songs easily.
You cannot use your I-Tunes created playlists. This (and not being able to play protected AAC files) is about the only function that does not work with a Mac.
I mostly listen to jazz vocal and classical vocal music (with a little White Stripes and the Smiths thrown in). Using both the supplied EX style earbud headphones and my Sony MDR7509 headphones, I listened to the unit side by side against the NWZ-S618, a 2 GB I-Pod and my Yamaha CDX-1080 CD player (using the headphone out). Now people out there seem to rant and rave against the I-Pod but the sound was almost identical between all these devices. If you really wanted to believe, you could say that sound coming from the CD player was a little bit rounder than the rest but the difference was so slight that it could have been my imagination. This is to say that the sound delivered by all the devices was very, very good, at least when heard on less than top flight super audiophile equipment. I also made a cursory comparison with an I-Phone and there, the sound was definitely different but I couldn't say one was better than the other, just different. For these tests, I used no EQ on the NWZ-A829 but the I-Pod had 'more bass' eq while the I-Phone was more heavily eq'd (which may have accounted for the 'different' sound).
There are two Shuffle modes. Normal and Time Machine. Normal just randomizes song order. Time Machine randomly chooses a year and then shuffles all the songs from that year. Cute but a bit useless.
There are various sonic options available like a five band customizable EQ, Surround Sound and other sound enhancements. I do not generally like to EQ music and the Surround effects sound very processed. I do turn on the DSEE sound enhancement and Clear Stereo but I don't really hear a big difference with these on or off. The 5 band EQ offers a number of factory settings as well as two custom slots. The EQ can be quite effective, especially the 'Clear Bass' band. This can add a very dramatic bottom to the sound. The EQ section is much more flexible than on an I-Pod and can be very dynamic at the risk of sounding overly processed if used to excess. 'There is also a Normalizer which is useful in Shuffle mode (quiet songs and loud songs play at similar volumes).

The Video
This device can store and play Mpeg4 format videos. This means that you cannot just load up a DVD and drop the files into the device. You first have to extract the video files and then convert them to Mpeg4. There are many tools out there that can do this. When you convert the files to Mpeg4 however, you must follow certain rules otherwise the device will not be able to read the files. The bit rate of the file must not be higher than 2500kb/sec. and (most importantly) the resolution must be 320X240 or lower (320X180 for anamorphic widescreen). It was a bit frustrating as Sony does not include all this information in the documentation. I got help for loading videos onto the device here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/539019/how_to_put_videos_on_a_sony_walkman.html
You can also show thumbnails alongside the video titles in the video selection menu but these tiny pictures can also be difficult to format. I tried using screen shot jpegs scaled to 160 X 120 (as per the instructions) but these did not work. But I could take a screen shot (which was just scaled to a 4:3 format), open it up in Photoshop and then scale it to160 X 120 pixels (I used from 72 to 240 pixels/inch, they all worked). I then did 'save as...' a jpeg. If I dropped this jpeg into the proper video folder and gave it the exact same title as the video, then it would show up as a thumbnail. My mistake here was that the screen shot had an extension .jpeg while the Sony will only recognize .jpg extensions.
I bought this device to play videos. The video screen on the NWZ-S618 was really nice but at 1.8 inches (diagonal) was just too small. I wanted to have something I could watch on a crowded airplane (opening a 15 inch laptop when the person 'seated' in front of you is trying to turn his seat into a bed is a trying experience). The screen is still small on the NWZ-A829 but large enough to read the subtitles on Berlin Alexanderplatz so it was good for me.
At first, I felt that it was with this video screen that the Sony fell a bit short. When you see it on its own, the screen looks good, bright and sharp. But if you put it beside the smaller NWZ-S618 screen, the screen looks too bright and the colors are washed out. Blacks are not black and colors are not as vivid and saturated as on the other device. You can lower the brightness which improves the blacks but then dulls the colors even more. Also there is a noticeable shift in the image quality if you do not view the screen from dead center. This was surprising as the image degrades a lot more than on the smaller Sony player. All these comparisons were done side by side with each device playing the same content.
I had a quick look at an I-Phone with its very large 3.5 inch LCD screen. Though the comparison was not side by side, the I-Phone too had very vivid colors and the picture looked really nice. Sometimes dark scenes (in Elizabeth The Golden Age) would look a bit plugged up but that was perhaps because my viewing environment was too bright. But it was the saturation of the colors, like the colors of the NWZ-S618 screen that looks really nice. The screens of those two devices 'popped' while the NWZ-A829 did not.
However, after placing the unit side by side with an 80GB I-Pod Classic, I took another view. Again, as for any of these players, if you make no direct comparisons the screens all look very impressive. But side by side with the I-Pod, the NWZ-A829 had a noticeably nicer picture. The I-Pod had a slight green cast to the picture and it was not as sharp and detailled as the Sony.
The Sony is much smaller and lighter than the Apples and thinner and sleeker than the older Sony. Perhaps because of the changes necessary to make such a thin LCD screen, the contrast ratio suffers a bit. It is an interesting and, for some, a justifiable trade-off.
The Mpeg4's that I am making have a less than 100KBps bit rate. There is some artifacting and occasionally perceptible but slight jerkiness that occurs in a rapidly moving image. Though I don't notice any ghosting, when the screen fades to black, there is a noticeable imprint that lingers for a couple of seconds on the screen. So if you are looking for perfection, look elsewhere. But we are compressing a 5 to 7 Gb file down to 400-600Mb. Even with this kind of compression and resulting lowering in video quality, I can only store about 40 hours of video on the 14.7Gb drive. though that is still more than 20 feature length films so that is not bad. The battery only lasts about 10 straight hours playing video at any rate.
One very neat item is the stand. The NWZ-A829 comes with a tiny plastic stand that plugs into a little hole in the back of the unit. This allows the unit to sit at an angle on a table so you can watch videos without holding the unit. It works extremely well on airplane tray tables. You can tie it to the unit so it dangles around while not in use but it is so small and light that it is not a bother. A really great idea that is supplied with the unit.

The Headphones.
So this unit comes with 'EX style' earplug headphones. Don't be fooled, these are not MDR-EX90LPs. Those $150 dollar earplugs sound incredibly nice with a very solid bass and a glossy treble sheen. The supplied earplugs, while not as nice sound pretty good. They have an excellent bass sound and the high end, while not glossy like the 90LPs is solid and natural sounding. They almost sound as good as my full enclosure MDR-7509s, though the full enclosure of those headphones creates a larger space that these earplugs cannot reproduce. Side by side with I-Pod headphones, the EX sound is more natural with less of a 'canniness' in the midrange. There is no comparison with the headphones that were supplied with the NWZ-S618. Compared to the EX style earplugs, these sounded like $10 trash.

Bluetooth
For an extra $20, the NWZ-A829 (as opposed to the NWZ-A729) offers a Bluetooth option. This is an audio option only. You cannot transfer files via Bluetooth (which would have been way cool) but can only use Bluetooth enabled audio equipment (like headphones) to listen to music without any wires attached to the unit. Bluetooth headphones are not supplied with the unit. I do not have any Bluetooth headphones so I could not test to see how the sound quality is affected using this option.

Other
Like the NWZ-S618, you can load and show .jpeg photos on the device. It does not accept RAW photos. Unlike the NWZ-S618, there is no radio.

Bottom Line
Okay, so why would you buy this? An I-Pod touch costs about $100 more, has a much larger video screen but only 8GB of memory. The I-Pod Classic has an incredible 80Gb of memory with a similar size screen but costs $50 less. Both are quite a bit bulkier than the Sony and the I-Pod Classic has inferior video performance. The Sony has nice headphones as standard equipment and has a Bluetooth option but you have to supply your own Bluetooth headphones. The Sony's advertised battery life is longer than the two Apple units, especially for video.
The Sony has a lot of things going for it. If it had the eye popping video screen of the NWZ-S618 I would say it was a winner but as it is, it is more a question of choice. If you want a small, very portable unit with pretty good video performance with an adequate memory then this might be the player for you. However the big bright screen of the I-Pod Touch (admittedly, I am judging the I-Pod Touch screen based on my viewing of an I-Phone screen. They may not be the same) and the more modest price with a lot more memory of the I-Pod Classic offer viable alternatives.