Navigation (3.25)
Navigation is carried out by using the device's d-pad and select button. While this is an easy setup to master, it's not the most efficient. We have a standardized timing test where we browse from one specific song playing to get another one to start up. In the Walkman's case, it wasn't particularly fast. Even when you use the directional arrows to autoscroll, it takes a long time to get from one place to another.
Sorting (8.00)
The Walkman 16GB has a few options for sorting your music. Inside the media player, you can choose to either view all songs as a whole, or by album, artist, genre, release year, or folder. You can also opt to load a playlist from the main menu. Once you're in a subcategory, it will automatically be sorted alphabetically. You cannot opt to sort by rating or assign ratings to your songs on the device. Even so, this is a solid list of sort criteria. We liked the inclusion of the ability to sort by folder, which isn't a typical sort criteria.
Search (1.00)
You are allowed to search through artists, albums, and songs based on what the Walkman 16GB refers to as an "Initial Search." An alphabet will pop up, prompting you to choose a letter, "0-9" for songs that begin with a number, or "etc." for songs that begin with a symbol. If there's at least one artist/album/song beginning with a given letter, that letter will appear white; if nothing starts with that letter, it'll show up gray.
Overall, this is really the bare minimum for searching, and it's not even implemented well. You have to quit out of the media player application, all the way back to the homescreen, and then open up Initial Search. In many cases it'd be easier to just open up album, artist, genre, etc. from the library, since there's more options. Of course, if a range of letters doesn't have many songs in them, they'll get grouped together, meaning you'll have to look at several letters' worth of songs. Even in this instance, however, it'd probably be easier to just scroll to the pertinent letter rather than exit out of the application and choose a specific letter. Regardless, the option is there should you choose to use it.
Playlists (0.0)
The Sony Walkman 16GB supports .PLA playlist files, but only if you've synchronized them with Windows Media Player. We tried copying and pasting in a PLA file, which we made in Windows Media Player, but it wasn't recognized if the file wasn't currently available in Windows Media Player. While this won't affect many Windows Media Player users, those who use different applications, such as Winamp will most likely find this feature to be annoying. Playlists also can't be created or altered on the device itself.
As an interesting side note, we had some weirdness regarding playlists and Sony's proprietary software. The Walkman sync software recognized and listed our M3U and PLA playlists in its file manager, but when we tried to transfer them to the device a giant error message popped up. It said, "The following files are incompatible:" and proceeded to list all the files in each playlist—all of which we'd already managed to both sync and drag & drop onto the device successfully. For this and other reasons, stick to Windows Media Player (though there is one reason why you might want to use the proprietary software).
Equalizer & Filters (7.75)
The equalizer feature allows you to control six different frequency ranges. Five of these ranges will let you boost or limit them on a -3 to +3 integer scale (the sixth, the bass boost, will only let you increase the decibel level). Though this won't allow for particularly fine tuning, it should somewhat help shape the sound to your liking. There are also four presets included: heavy (rock), pop, jazz, and unique (techno?).
In addition to the Equalizer, there are a few other sound-altering features included on the Walkman 16GB. The first is VPT, which is a surround sound mode, and the second is DSEE, which is a sound enhancer. We tried listening to both. While we noticed the surround sound mode changed the way the audio sounded, we didn't find a sound file where the DSEE made much of a difference.
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