Editors' note: The Sony NW-A1000 isn't yet available in the United States, but the editors at our sister site, CNET Asia, easily acquired one for review. We here at MP3.com can't wait to get our hands on one of these slick-looking Walkmans, but in the meantime, we thought you might like to learn some details about the NW-A1000. In the spirit of this thirst for knowledge, we've ported this review over from CNET Asia--yes, we know it's a bit of a tease, but we just couldn't resist. Please be advised that the details of this review, as well as the rating, apply only to the NW-A1000 that is for sale in Asia.

It's sleek. Awfully sleek. Make that sleek with a mouthful of drool. Sony has done it again. The new Sony Walkman NW-A1000 is so sexy that it's managed to make the iPod look positively prudish.

Design of Sony Walkman NW-A1000

We want to shower kudos on Sony for having the guts and the pizzazz to recreate its flagship Walkman. It's tough on all those designers, considering that each new player has to look radically different from the rest, such as the Bean, the NW-HD5, and the VAIO Pocket. In a cutthroat marketplace that is not unlike the mobile phones', pulling up your design socks is tantamount to preventing your toes from getting flattened by the competition. On the flip side, Sony's constantly morphing designs could be saying something else: that the Japanese firm has not yet concocted the magic bullet to take out the iPod.

The curve may invite scratches.

The 109-gram Sony NW-A1000 is decidedly stylish, and we are not just paying lip service. Sony has borrowed design elements from the flash-based NW-500 series with the OLED screen hidden within a full plastic faceplate. The latter, by the way, is so smoothly integrated into the design that it looks as if the player was poured into it. However, do note that the raised curvature of the front faceplate is a red carpet for fingerprints. We're surprised that Sony did not include a carrying pouch. The A1000 certainly feels substantial with its metallic facade adding a reassuring heft. Along with its curvy form factor, the A1000 feels very good in hand, actually miles better than the rectangular iPod Nano. Navigation and player controls (a quad-directional joypad, an Option button, and a Back key) are centered on the lower part of the front face. The joypad was a bit too small for our liking and certainly not a joy for fat fingers unless the plumb digit decided to do the pokey with nails. The even tinier Back and Option buttons seem to suggest the designers sacrificed too much to aesthetics, though the saving grace is that tactile feedback is solid enough to make the miniaturization a minor annoyance.

The Sony NW-A1000 comes in four brilliant colors, too.

The Option button opens up a contextual menu that's relevant to the active function. It's pretty detailed, with a variety of options such as Play Mode, Bookmarks, and Ratings, though it's odd that Sony neglected to include equalizer controls. The Back button is pretty self-explanatory: It returns to the previous menu, and by when pressed down and held, it reverts to the main menu. The hold function is activated via pressing a metallic key on the unit's top. There's also a slide switch on the side for volume control. Sony has added a glasslike Link button that lights up with squiggly orange lines when pressed--more on what it does in the Features section. Interestingly, Sony has abandoned the gimmicky screen-orientation mode found in the NW-HD5. We don't miss it. Taking a cue from its mobile phone division, the main menu for the A1000 uses an icon-based GUI. It's easy enough to understand and unlikely to get bogged down by Creative's patent.

Big brother A3000 with its sibling.

The OLED is plenty bright--indoors. Once sunshine comes into the picture, it will be a miracle if you can detect even a pixel. Sony has also decided to stick to a proprietary cable for connectivity, so it will be something extra to carry around if your music collection is located in two different computers. The battery is removable on this player, though we would suggest bringing it down to the service center for swapping; we had a difficult time trying to open up the back plate with a pair of tweezers, and the user manual wasn't too helpful, either.

Features of Sony Walkman NW-A1000

As with Sony's hard-drive MP3 players, the Japanese firm did not see fit to include additional functions such as radio and recording. Instead, Sony has concentrated on enhancing the user's listening experience, including its standard preset EQ settings--Heavy, Pop, Jazz, and Unique--as well as two user-defined six-band EQs. We felt that the basic delivery is good enough without resorting to tweaking. However, if adjustments are unavoidable, we suggest fiddling around with the user-defined ones rather than the presets.

A cradle may be coming soon.

If you have so many songs that former favorites get forgotten, the A1000 wants to help you relocate those gems. One of these tools is the Artist Link feature, which works best when you have lots of songs in the A1000. Pressing the Link button while a track is playing brings up a list of artists and songs from similar music genres. We like that, by highlighting an artist's name in the results, there is a 10-second intro of each song under the artist's belt. We did, however, encounter some unexpected associations, such as Jay Chow and DJ Killian. Sony also tried to repackage the A1000's shuffle features under Intelligent Shuffle. There's the My Favorite Shuffle, which shuffles the top 100 most-played tracks, and the chic-sounding Time Machine Shuffle, which sorts songs according to the year published. It's an interesting effort, but we feel it's more fluff than function.

The Artist Link button.

For the budding CSI investigator, the A1000 can display what was played on a given day of the calendar year. That's an incredibly helpful feature if you have a pesky sister who's always touching your stuff and need hard evidence to nail her down. There's also an initial search feature, though it's nothing compared to the keyword search ability of the Creative Zen Vision:M. We find adding tracks to a playlist is a simple two-click process. Though we were able to add new playlists from the software, the inability to do the same from the player itself dampened our fun a bit.

The display is seamlessly flush with the body.

And here's some big news: Sony has abandoned the buggy SonicStage software for the Connect player. The new rendition is miles nicer and easier to navigate without much of a sacrifice in functionality. It's decent music-management software with the usual ripping functions as well as a drag-and-drop interface. The design of the app is clean, and the inclusion of the Connect music store tab may be a hint that the Sony online music store could be hitting Asia soon.

Performance of Sony Walkman NW-A1000

The Sony NW-A1000's audio performance was top-notch. With our test Etymotic ER-4P MicroPro headphones, the bass on Massive Attack's "Angel" was solid and tight. We felt, however, that Diana Krall's "You Are Getting to Be a Habit with Me" was not warm enough in the mids.

With 240MB of MP3 files on looping playback at medium volume and no equalizers activated, the A1000 lasted only 13 hours, 35 minutes, which is a far cry from the NW-HD5's battery life.

It's rare that we mention bundled earphones at all, but the Sony MDR-E0931 'phones are a comfortable affair that delivers the lows with aplomb, though we felt they tended to muffle the highs and mids, resulting in slight distortion. The response of the NW-A1000's hard drive was less than ideal. We experienced varying lag times of 2 to 3 seconds while trying to move from one menu to another.