I should warn you: I’m sort of lukewarm on portable video players altogether. I don’t commute to work, and when I did, there was enough jostling and train swapping to make anything that required focused attention, like reading books or watching video, a fractured and annoying experience. But still, there is an opportunity for a video player like the HMP-A1 to be useful — I just don’t think this would be the one I would buy.
Read my full review inside.
First of all, it’s a nice feeling device, and exhibits the high-quality fit and finish of the better Sony products, although it was conspicuously less high-end than the Sony VAIO U50 I recently reviewed. Considering the U50 costs about three times as much, however, that’s somewhat understandable, but the power adapter and bundled headphones just seemed a lot cheaper and low-grade than I was expecting. The headphones I left wrapped up; I rarely use included headphones, let alone ones I have to return to the product vendor (which was Dynamism this time, I would add. Thanks, as always.)
https://gizmodo.com/sony-vaio-u50-review-awful-laptop-great-pda-16941
There are two sets of controls: a set of buttons for volume up/down, “tools,” and a dual-function hold and power switch, all of which run across the top; the back and forward buttons, scroll bar, play/pause, and back buttons are on the front and are immovable and touch-sensitive, like the iPod. The controls, while relatively instinctive to pick up, even in Japanese, leave a lot to be desired. The power/hold combo switch often seems unresponsive (I’m not sure the device even works when the USB cable is plugged in, perhaps because the hard disk is in use) and the front buttons have a frustrating tendency to not respond in a timely manner to input, something made doubly sucky by the fact that they provide no tactile feedback. It’s hard to tell if you’ve hit a button when a device takes two or three seconds to respond.
The bad things you might have heard about the transferring are true, at least if those bad things are that you have to use two separate programs to get files onto the HMP-A1. The first, and the only one I even messed with, was a custom bit of software from Sony called the “HMP Images Transfer Manager,” and even though it had some extra swoopy animation in the file browser that wasn’t too reassuring, overall it seemed to perform simply and without failure. If you’re copying over a video that is in a native MPEG format that the HMP-A1 can decode, transfer is fairly snappy — probably somewhere near full USB 2.0 speeds (although I didn’t benchmark it). It hurts, though, especially knowing the device has only a 20GB drive, to transfer a 50 megabyte WMV file only to see it converted on-the-fly to a 300 megabyte file so that the HMP-A1 can read it. I understand why Sony made that decision — supporting more compressed formats on the device would require a faster decoding processor, meaning less battery life — but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Once the files are over, though, playback is pretty simple, although stopping and starting a file that’s already playing to jump back out to a menu takes far longer than you would expect. The video quality is decent, too, although the resolution of the LCD screen seems low (I can’t find the actual specs on Sony’s site). It is disappointing that Sony’s HMP Image Transfer Manager software doesn’t downscale the video to its native resolution, but I suppose that’s the trade off to prevent file transfers of non-native file types from taking even longer.
So, yeah, I dunno, it works, but it’s just not polished. Just little irritating things, too, that certainly could have been fixed, like the fact that there is no way to zoom in on images that you copy over to the device. I had a great idea, I thought, when I copied over a Mapquest map of a Manhattan hotel I was to meet the Gawker editors at (minus Ana Marie, of course, because she had to get her hairs did). And it was a great idea, until I realized I couldn’t zoom in on the GIF to see the actual street detail. If I wanted a blurry map of the city I’d just use my brain.
So my advice? Wait for one of the new iRiver or Archos players — or maybe that new DVX-Pod; that looks sort of hot — instead of paying the importer’s premium for a device that isn’t much of a video player, isn’t much of an MP3 player (and I didn’t even try, but I can just tell from the size and interface it’s probably not what you want), and doesn’t have much hope for firmware upgrades or the like from Sony in the future. It is cool, though, and that’s something. I’m starting to warm up to the idea of a video player on my portable hard drive player now just a teensy bit more. It’s not that I want one, exactly, so much as I wouldn’t mind one.
Related
Sony VAIO U50 Review: Awful Laptop, Great PDA [Gizmodo]
Sony’s HMP-A1 VAIO Video Pocket Video Review [Gizmodo]
More MobiNote DVX-POD 7010 Details [Gizmodo]
https://gizmodo.com/sonys-hmp-a1-vaio-video-pocket-video-review-16283
