Sony B130F Review
Sony's last stick player never made it to the US or Europe and it's been a while since we've seen a small player from them that we could actually go out and buy. Along with the new E and S series players announced earlier this fall Sony announced a new such stick player, the B130F.
While lacking the color screen found on other stick players from Sony the B130F is still a nice looking player with MTP replacing the previous Sonic Stage dependability of older players. The player is a nice supplement to the stick player market but also has its flaws. Read on for the full review.
- Quick Look
- Size: 90.7 x 25.0 x 15.2 mm
- Capacities: 1, 2GB
- Screen: 3 line LCD Display
- Audio: MP3, WMA
- Battery: 16 hours audio (rated)
Accessories
The box contains only the bare minimum: Player, earphones and various papers. Since the USB connector is built in there is no need for a cable, but considering the player is a tad bit thick it wouldn't have been a bad idea to include an extension cable to make sure it fits into all USB ports. As for additional accessories Sony offers a silicon case for $14.99 and an armband for $19.99.
Design
The design is very typical Sony stick player design and looks a bit like the old NW-E00X. It's thicker than players such as the Samsung U3 or iriver T7 but it also feels way more solid. The back has a sort of anti slip texture to it and the headphone jack is located at the end of a short integrated metal sylinder. All in all extremely durable design and it is by far the most solid feeling small player on the market. No squeeking when pressing buttons and no flaws caused by thin plastic or flawed molds.
The top face of the player has play/pause button, next and previous track buttons and a small menu button. At first I though there was D pad on top because the LEDs on either side of the play button look like tiny buttons. On the bottom there's a hold switch and on the back theres a small hole for resetting the player. On top there are volume control buttons, a record button and a button simply named "bass". While I'm not a fan of dedicated record buttons, this one at least makes sense since the microphone is located next to the headphone jack and holding the player as a microphone means your thumb will have access to the record button while the microphone points forward.
The B130 has a integrated USB connector that is actually a full USB connector and not the plastic flat ones found on the T7 and U3. While it's bigger it sits so much better in the USB port where the flat connectors tend to fall out if you look at them the wrong way. This does mean there's a connector cap though and while it does sit on very well it's easy to lose it if you don't keep track of it while it's off.
Transferring Media
Like Samsung, Sony apparently thinks stick players with MTP file transfer only is a good idea. It's not. If you're going to make a player capable of connecting without dragging around a bunch of cables, the least you can do is allow it to work on any device capable of using USB memory sticks. While I don't have any Linux of Mac computers here to check, the player didn't work on my DVD player or my Nokia N800 through host mode even though I had set the player to use 100mAh bus power only. If it had been unofficially capable of switching to MSC like other Sony players it should have worked on those two devices, so i can only conclude this one really is MTP only.
MTP means that it will work with any Windows computer running XP SP2 or above and Vista, but not Linux or Mac. Simply drag and drop files onto the player in Windows Explorer and they will work. Playlists can be made using MTP compatible applications or simply by right clicking the files in explorer and selecting playlist (requires WMP11 installed). The player doesn't come with any software whatsoever which in my opinion is good since included software tends to confuse people when the player really doesn't need any.
Interface
Menus
When I first turned on the player I thought the screen was broken because the LCD has lot of lines and whatnot visible in the background. this isnt caused by the pixels themselves but rather the physical back part of the screen being grainy. It looks a bit weird but doesn't hinder usage in any way. Sony claims the LCD is a color screen but so far I've only seen one color - white. Both the text and icons are white and very easy to see in all lighting conditions. Viewing angle isn't great in the sense that like other LCDs the colors invert if you view it from extreme angles (you can still see whats on the screen, just inverted colors).
The main menu is very simple with four icons; Voice, Music Library, FM and Settings. Unlike other players Sony haven't split the settings between the main settings menu and a separate playback settings menu accessible from the "now playing" screen. While I do generally prefer having playback settings easily accessible like on the Sansa Clip, it's at least better to have it all in one place rather than splitting it between the two like on the Samsung U3. Settings include various options for music, radio and recording along with common settings like volume limit, power saving and turning LEDs on and off.
Music Browsing
The B130F actually allow for both file/folder browsing and ID3 browsing, putting it in somewhat of an exclusive position. The problem is that the scrolling is extremely slow and scrolling through large lists of files takes ages. In one second it is only able to scroll past two songs so you better not have folders with a lot of files in them or it will take forever to find a specific track. Slow scrolling is something that has proven a big problem on a lot of players and it totally ruins the overall usability of the player. The Cowon U2 was fast. The Sansa Clip is fast. There is no excuse for making players this slow, especially not when the player itself is so good.
Another extremely peculiar aspect of the music browsing is that if you select "all songs" it will sort files by the name of the artist and not alphabetically by track title. I haven't seen this used on any other player before and I had to go into my computer and sort files by various tags to find out what it was doing because at first glance it looked totally random.
The music playback screen is also a bit weird because it shows the category you browsed from instead of the artist along with the track title on the screen. If I for example select the song "Down Under" from the music library by means of "all songs", it will say "all songs" underneath the track title on the now playing screen. if i find the track by going to "genres" and "pop" it will say "pop" on the now playing screen. Wasted space in my opinion, especially since they didn't find room for showing the time elapsed of the song and instead have a small progress bar showing how far into the song you have progressed. If you were to use the player for podcasts or other long files and lose your position you'd have to guess where on the progress bar you left off even if you knew you'd been listening for say 20 minutes. Not exactly reasons to doom the player but still very peculiar choices.
Sound Quality
Sound quality is one of the strong points of this player. It sounds very good and it doesn't lose out in details or sound stage which I've often seen happening with other small players. The included ear buds are just garbage and this player really justifies investing in some higher end headphones to really make use of the sound quality.
There is however a big downside. Though Sony players are often underpowered with 5mW output, their bigger players like the S710 and A820 have always been able to drive my 80ohm Beyerdynamic DT770 on 2/3 volume with no problem. The B130F doesn't even provide enough juice on max volume to drive it (and yes, the volume limit is off). It even had problems with my 60ohm Koss KSC75 and I wouldn't recommend this player to anyone not using very easily driven headphones.
Sound enhancements are also present on the B130F though not in the normal Sony sense with ClearBass and all that. There's an equalizer with a few presets and a custom setting, all of which are utterly useless since any setting except "normal" sound very bad. That brings me back to the mysterious button simply named "bass". While it is likely the most awesome label for a button I've ever seen its real life usefulness isn't that great. Pushing the button activates what Sony calls "Mega Bass" and that's no understatement. The bass boost given by this button pretty much makes Cowons mach3bass seem like a tweeter setting and not in a good way. There's no way to control the amount of bass and so you're either in all the way or you won't be able to use it. It ruins every other frequency range and pounds all it's power into making the headphone membrane vibrate as much as possible. I have a hard time seeing anyone use this feature for an extended period of time unless they have the world's most bass lacking headphones to begin with. The bass button is an interesting idea but when the technology linked to it is useless then so is the button. What makes things worse is that one of the most entertaining features on the player only works with the bass boost on; the four LEDs hidden around the play button will blink to the rhythm of the music if LEDs are set to "on", which provides a bit of entertainment for the eyes while the ears are busy. There is however no way to turn this on without using the bass boost and so it's not all that great.
Radio
The radio works OK but isn't the strongest I've seen and i couldn't get a good signal inside the house. It does support presets and you can even record from the radio. Sound quality is very good if you have a good signal and the bass boost works here as well. One thing I really like about the radio is that they separated manual searching into it's own menu item instead of switching between presets and manual in settings like on many players. The radio record feature shouldn't be dismissed as just a novelty as the player is capable of recording to 44.1khz WAV even though its compressed to about 360kbps. The recordings sounds good but recording to MP3 would have been even better as the files take up a lot of space, about 2.5MB per minute at max quality.
Voice Recording
The recording quality is decent and the strategically placed microphone helps a bit, but it's extremely sensitive to any handling of the player itself while recording. Simply touching the player gently will make it sound like a jetplane flying by on the actual recording. It's also not the best for long distance recording like lectures since it picks up its share of background noise.
Battery
The quick charge feature very nice and allows you to get about 90 minutes of play time out of 3 minutes plugged into a USB port. Rated battery life is 16 hours based on 128kbps MP3, so actual runtime is closer to 13+ hours depending on how much you fiddle with it in between. Using the music reactive LEDs will significantly reduce that but you will have a major headache from the bass boost long before the battery runs dry anyways.
Conclusion
For stick players and other similar small players there isn't much difference in features from one to another so it's all about how well the features work. The Clip has been the king of this market for ages and the B130F is the closest I've seen of a competitor so far, but the awfully slow scrolling speed effectively destroys it's quest for the throne. The build quality is awesome, the USB connector is very useful, it sounds very good and actually has a usable radio but it's simply way too slow if you browse individual songs a lot. If not then it's still a good choice and is worth considering. Price wise it's not too bad either even though $60 for 2GB is a bit high compared to the Clip and the Stone Plus. All in all a good player with some noticeable flaws, but nothing that renders it totally unusable.
Pros
- Integrated USB connector
- Very good build quality
- Sound quality is excellent
- ID3 and folder browsing
- LED light show
- Radio with recording
- Decent screen
Cons
- Slow scrolling
- Bass boost is way too exaggerated
- No UMS
- A bit expensive
Comments
dan on October 4, 2008 11:24 PM
Haha mpio players had the ability to chose the scoll speed and where better than this :P
Wim on October 5, 2008 7:07 AM
Wow, there really didn't happen a thing in the past 3 years..
I have a three years old iAudio G2 somewhere, with a better screen, better sound enhancements and better battery life and UMS..
Who on earth will buy this?
milosh on October 5, 2008 7:27 AM
To be fair, MTP is supposed to work on linux and mac using mtpfs or gphotofs.
Andreas Ødegård on October 5, 2008 1:22 PM
@milosh: yes, but the "do it yourself" mentality of linux where anything can work as long as youre willing to play with it for a few hours isnt exactly the same as out of the box support
matus201 on October 5, 2008 11:54 PM
to Wim: have u ever seen emgeton minimax? thats the best small player i ever had.. (unfortunately mine is dead, after few years of usage :( )
small, built in speaker, tv control, 2x 3.5 mm output (one could be used for line-in recording), 35 hours of music, UMS, it supported ogg, color screen, great sound quality..
These new players suck.. even old sony nw-e500 (except of sonic stage) looks better..
AA on October 11, 2008 5:59 AM
The B100 is better because it's a UMS device-but the newer 130 series isn't. Not good, Sony!
I'm usually a fan of NWZ- series players, so MTP on the B130 is a step in the wrong direction.
Also, I reckon the new E/S series may use MTP too.
hate on October 19, 2008 7:09 AM
goddamn! my mp3 has finished!they said it can be charged by plugged, but now i can't even on/start this goddamn mother fucker things!fuck sony
Bruce on October 26, 2008 12:41 AM
*no removable battery
*no universal mass-storage drag-n-drop
*no removable media
*low volume output with higher-impedance full-sized headphones
*no FLAC
I guess this device is not for me. Sony, do you still believe in innovation and/or usefulness?