Sony Walkman NWZ-Z1060 review

Not everyone’s interested in gaming on their mobile device, but Android’s developers have packed the Google Play store with plenty of top notch casual games. The large 4.3in screen really lends itself to cult construction title Minecraft, Sentinel III – our favourite tower defence strategy game – and board game conversions such as Catan, making it easy to see and control your games. The Z1060 is also powerful enough to play processor-intensive 3D action games such as Captain America, making this a good buy for those who want their MP3 player to serve double duty as a handheld games console. There’s a huge 1GB of internal storage for apps.

The Walkman is also good for films, with support for a wide variety of video formats including H.264 MP4 fles, WMV, Quicktime MOV, XviD and more. Not all our test files worked, and some of the less standard resolutions didn’t adjust properly to the screen size, but the vast majority played without a hitch. Sony’s own video player app didn’t work with all our test files, but the Walkman still has Android’s integrated video player, so when we added a file manager app and browsed to our video directory, we could play almost everything. Adding a third party app such as MX Player meant that we could even play even unusual formats such as MKV, although the challenge of decoding our high resolution MKV videos lead to slowdown and lag.

Regardless of what application you use, the Walkman is an excellent video player. The screen can’t rival the high-resolution “retina” displays of recent Apple devices, but it’s nonetheless an excellent display. Our photos and videos looked great, with even lighting and intense colours that made them particularly easy to watch at this relatively small size. The glossy screen tends to pick up smears and fingerprints, but no more so than other touchscreen devices.

At £275, the Walkman costs around £70 more than a 32GB 4th Generation Apple iPod Touch, which has a 960×640 display and a massive battery capable of providing over 48 hours’ audio playback and almost 8 hours of video. However, the iPod is seriously limited by being tied to iTunes and its store. Although you can get third party video and audio player software that allows you to escape the iPod’s very limited range of supported formats, the iPod doesn’t make your life easy.

If you want to be able to play as much of your media collection as possible on a single device and access online content which requires Flash, the Walkman NWZ-Z1060 is the high-end media player for you, despite odd niggles such as a its proprietary connector. However, most users will do better with the lower price and higher display resolution of its iOS rival or an Android phone with a large screen and battery, such as the Motorola RAZR MAXX.