Maybe not so much a battle as a minor skirmish, but the Sony Ericsson W950, the Nokia N91 and the iPod Shuffle all come out of Ewan's blind listening tests with decent scores. Read the article for details and comments.
Read on in the full article.
As the survey showed and Steve confirmed, there isn't that much to choose from between the actual devices in terms of sound quality. Most blind test articles like this seem to bear out these results, when you use the same headphones and files the devices sound the same.
What worries me is when these very expensive phones that cost hundreds of dollars are bundled with cheap headphones that save the manufacturer just a few dollars, and negate the whole advantage of buying expensive kit.
It's like going to an expensive restaurant and the food being really good, but it's served wrapped in newspaper with plastic cutlery.
What i'd like to know is whether the dedicated music keys actually gave an advantage to the n91 in terms of ui convenience. Since nokia seems to be adding them to all the new nseries phones i'm interested to know how much of a difference they make.
The N91 is a relatively old smartphone now, when it first came out it was the only Nokia to have dedicated music keys on the cover.
The keys can be very useful, it depends how you use the phone. They mean you don't have to look at the phone's screen to change tracks or stop and start, and they let you change tracks without having to unlock or open the phone first.
Several newer smartphones have the keys on the outside too, and have better hardware and a screen, but they won't have the HDD (although as memory cards get larger that's less and less important, many people would be happy with a 2 GB memory card which is what most smartphones can use now).
Once you've used the dedicated keys on the N91 there's nothing like it. You'll wonder how you lived so long without them.
The dedicated keys on other devices is nothing like the N91, I mean try the N95; it's difficult to operate.
Boom
Ha-ha..who needs dedicated music buttons? I don't.
I have a N73 (ME) and the player is operated with the joystick. Push it down and it plays/pauses, push it to the right and it skips a file or you can make it go fast forward with the tune you are listening..and so on.
Everyhing you need under your thump or what ever finger your are using.
Henrikki
Using high-end (�60+) hifi quality headphones for me the W950 sounds better than the SE P990 and SE M600. Your observation about the W950 handling complex music is spot-on with my experience.
Unregistered wrote:Ha-ha..who needs dedicated music buttons? I don't.I have a N73 (ME) and the player is operated with the joystick. Push it down and it plays/pauses, push it to the right and it skips a file or you can make it go fast forward with the tune you are listening..and so on.
Everyhing you need under your thump or what ever finger your are using.
Henrikki
Listening to music while using the browser or reading/replying to mails; you decide to stop the player or change the track. Does the joystick still work?
Boom
Nice comparison, though I believe the W950 has a bit more than 4MB of memory 😊