Sony's portable music players have not been particularly popular - certainly not when compared with the company's ubiquitous cassette Walkman.

That's largely down to Sony's insistence on forcing users to use its annoying Connect software and non-standard Atrac format, forcing people to translate their music files.

This philosophy appears to have changed: the A815 now offers drag-and-drop music transfer, a fact that’s plastered all over the box and takes up a whopping six pages in the manual, despite being the a fairly simple procedure.

Apart from those usability problems, Sony’s MP3 players have set the bar high when it comes to audio performance, and things are no different where the NWZ-A815 is concerned.

There is a wide range of ways to select and control the music stored on the player, from the intelligent shuffle to searching using the artist's initial letter, as well as a range of audio effects including an equaliser, presets to make it sound like the music is being played in different environments, and some advanced sound processing technology. This all adds up to the cleanest and most impressive sound we've yet heard from a portable music player, and it all reinforces Sony’s position at the top of the pile.

Video and photo playback are also very good thanks to the excellent 2in colour screen, and you’ll find it very easy to move around all of these features using the simple but effective controls. The only real problem we had was encoding video to the correct format, and unless you’ve had some experience in this area you will find it quite frustrating that there is no program supplied to do the job for you.

The player has an impressive battery life of 33 hours and has a very reasonable price tag (it starts at £89 for 2GB of storage space). The A815 still lacks some features compared with its rivals, such as a voice recorder and an FM radio, but if audio playback is your top priority rest assured that you won’t find anything more accessible, or nicer to use than Sony’s latest.

Vista compatible: Yes