4. So How Does It Perform?

Before taking a look at sound quality, let's examine an equally important feature - battery life. The NW-MS70D features an in-built rechargeable battery, which Sony says has up to 33 hours of life before needing to be recharged. During our internal testing of the device, we found this rating to be fairly modest, as we were able to run our unit for almost 40 hours without issue. When compared to the iPod's battery life of just 8 hours, this is very impressive indeed - an ideal feature for travelers.

Transferring files to the device is a painless affair, with our unit reaching an average transfer rate of around 0.25 MB/sec. While this is fairly speedy, it still lags behind competing portable audio players that don't utilize a proprietary compression format, as mentioned earlier.

One of the most significant advantages of flash-based audio players when compared to hard-drive based units or CD players is the fact that the lack of moving parts eliminates skipping. As a result, you can shake them around as much as you like (i.e. whilst jogging), and you won't get one skip in your track (no pun intended). Furthermore, this also means that the player consumes far less power, as highlighted by the NW-MS70D's extremely long battery life.

Moving on to sound quality, another aspect of this player that surprised us was the quality of headphones provided. While the headphones that are usually bundled with many cheaper audio players are poor to say the least and do the player little justice, Sony's earbuds produced excellent low, mid and high-range acoustics, with the "bass boost" function improving sound quality immensely. Furthermore, even at extremely high volumes there was little to no distortion, while clarity and reproduction was equally satisfying. Having said that, however, although tracks ripped directly from CDs can easily compete with the iPod, those that we re-encoded from MP3 were clearly of a lower quality. While the difference won't be very noticeable for many, this will certainly come as a disappointment to audiophiles

To Buy Or Not To Buy, That Is The Question

Overall, whether or not you purchase this device really depends on personal taste. If you're after a compact, lightweight audio player with a relatively large capacity, huge battery life and basic functionality, then you certainly won't be disappointed with the Sony NW-MS70D. However, if you're looking for extensive PDA-like functionality, a huge capacity (5 GB+), and are mainly transferring tracks from your hard disk, then the Apple iPod is definitely a more logical purchase. In addition, with both the Sony NW-MS70D and the 5 GB Apple iPod having the same RRP of $299, price isn't an issue in this case.

The bottom line is, while we can't exactly label the NW-MS70D as an "iPod killer" due to a number of issues such as its proprietary compression format - resulting in slower transfers and quality degradation - it is nonetheless a quality product that is more than worthy of your hard-earned green.