How far the iconic pioneering music player has come! What was once in the 1970s a bulky little cassette player is now a biscuit-thin tiny gadget that can be slipped into your shirt pocket. Sleek and easy to hold, the Walkman NW-A35 is another in the series of players from Sony that was launched in India recently.
Neat and minimalistic
This player and the others in the A30 series have a minimalistic design — much like the one on Sony’s smartphones, minus all the glass. The A35 comes in a sort of grey-black colour and is a neat and premium looking gadget. It’s very light and slim and yet doesn’t look overly fragile. The controls on the device couldn’t be less complicated.
There’s a power button, volume buttons, play, pause and forward, rewind buttons — just as there used to be on the original Walkmans — and a Hold button to stop accidental tampering with the controls. All of these small but clear buttons sit on the right spine of the gadget. On the left is a slot for a microSD card, which you can load up with additional music of up to 128GB, adding to the 16GB onboard the A35. When you turn the device on, you’ll find it’s entirely intuitive and familiar to use.
The 3.1-inch display, which takes up the entire front of the device except for slim and neat bezels, is rather nice and is, of course, touch enabled. You can just swipe through songs and playlists. It just seems to have no extra features that could get in the way — plain music in a straightforward gadget.
Choose your headphones wisely
But it isn’t a great idea to just slap on any old headphones with the A35. The player supports high resolution music and to get the best out of it, you need the music itself to be lossless and the headphones to be ones that can support listening to high quality music. If it’s ordinary music you want, there are other options, but if you’re sensitive to the quality, you can neither do with tiny MP3s nor the kind of earphones you’d use with the standard smartphone. The difference between ordinary and hi-res headphones is instantly noticeable even to the average listener.
The A35 has its own proprietary charging cable and takes about four hours to go from zero to full. But then it also takes 48 hours to run out on you. The player also has another trick up its sleeve: it cuts out steady sound such as from an air conditioner and even other milder sounds around you.
Price: ₹15,990
Pros: Sound quality, neatness and compactness, battery life, cuts noise
Cons: A little pricey
(The article first appeared in The Hindu BusinessLine.)