Portable Music is becoming a common sight among the daily commuters in India. Thanks to the recent (or maybe not-so-recent) FM revolution, everyone traveling around you seems to have a set of headphones attached to his/her ears. With a huge range of portable music players out there, the consumer has a ton of options to choose the kind of player that will be best suited to his need, after all not everyone enjoys listing to FM channels' limited track listing.

We take a look at one of the not-so popular portable MP3 CD players from Sony - the D-NE1. This CD Walkman is capable of not only playing your regular MP3 and audio CDs, but also supports Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 format (capable of storing up to 30 albums on a single CD). How good does it perform? Let's take a look!





Packaging and Looks
The box contains the D-NE1, 2 NH-14WM rechargeable batteries, a remote control unit, earphones, a charging/docking unit, an A/C adapter, a CD containing software for ATRAC3 conversion and burning and finally a user manual.

The D-NE1 gets full points for its looks. The unit's ultra-slim, silver exterior makes it look exceptionally sleek. The top rim is made of transparent plastic, which allows you to see the CD inside. A negative point is the lack of an LCD screen on the main unit, which makes the player dependant on the remote control in case you need to see the name of the song that's playing or even selecting a particular track from a CD full of 150 MP3s. However, the unit does have the basic playback buttons, so the player is quite functional on its own.

The remote control unit is cylindrical in shape with a backlit dot-matrix screen that displays the ID3 Tags from MP3s and CD Text from audio CDs. The great part about the remote is that it has all the controls for the CD player on it, so you'll never need to reach out for the player as long as the remote is handy.

The earphones attach to the remote control or directly to the player depending on whether you wish to use the remote or not. Visually, the earphones look very plain and basic. In fact, at first sight, you may not even expect them to perform well, but once you hear them, it's a completely different story.

The charging dock is shaped like a stand, so you can stylishly put the D-NE1 player on display while your batteries are getting charged. Yep, it's totally neighbour's envy, owner's pride!