I used to have these big mp3 players with big hard drives. I shot out a lot of these players with my expensive Ultimate Ears Super.fi 5 pro Headphones. In the end, I bought the Sony Walkman pictured above. It came with decent headphones that by themselves would cost you 80 bucks. I don’t use them thanks to my Ultimate ears but, If I could not afford expensive ear buds, the ones that come with this walkman sure are great for pack in headphones. I hate the ipods. They sound like shit. Crappy DACs. I hate that you cannot view the file system, like by directory and folder etc. That is why I never recommend any ipod to anyone. This walkman doesn’t have the ipod limitations. Not to mention I don’t really like itunes, bad sound quality on most of the music, and DRM. (I’m all about amazon.com mp3, they are all 256, drm free and cheaper usually). Sony got rid of all the DRM in their newer mp3 players. I can plug this into any pc, mac, and i think Linux as well. It shows up as a drive. You charge it up via usb only though. I prefer to view the file tree by folder and files and not by id tags. It can do id tags as well though. It shows LP art as well. No it doesn’t have cover flow but who cares, that gets old in 3 seconds. The competition just doesn’t even come close.

The converters on this walkman are great. I think it sounds amazing. More real and flat. Not hyped. There are fx and eqs that help a lot, and you can do a custom eq as well. The limiter is nice and can help when you listen to old music that is not mastered as hot and loud as todays music. I thought this unit sounded the best. I think the Iaudio and Iriver give it a run for its money on the DAC quality. But not with the pack in headphones, or video playback and size. This thing is tiny, but it does have a decent display for being so small. You can watch videos on this. I use ffmpegx to convert to mp4 low res. This is great to take with you. A couple of videos. or Anime can really make time pass when waiting on car repairs or anything like that. This thing has saved my life from pure boredom when I am out and about waiting. I only need about 8gb. That works for me. Transfering to this device is a little slower than my old iriver 320. But once it’s on there, it’s great. I used to work out at the gym a lot, and I would get long pauses on my hd mp3 players if I was running hard when it would try and switch songs. Not the case on the walkman. It plays perfect with out hickups no matter how much I jump around.

The thing that really pushed this unit over the top for me was the size. I hated carrying around this huge brick of an mp3 player when i would go to the gym. I needed something smaller. I looked at the Ipod nano before i looked at this. And man the converters on that thing sound like ass. I hate the nav wheel on the apple crap as well. The Sony walkman navs great, with a directional button, a center click, and two other buttons on the front. Volume control on the side! This is a big plus compared to the Ipod as well. For the price and the money, you get the best pack in headphones. The best audio quality. The best screen and video playback. DRM free, and copy files from any os, it shows up as a hard drive, you can open it up and copy to it drag and drop. (you are not forced to use windows media player or itunes, which I hate) Seriously, amazon is selling them for 199 dollars for the 8 gig. They come in 3 colors, silver, white, and black. They all look cool. Seriously, this is about the size of a credit card, a little smaller actually. The battery life is about 33 hours of mp3 playback on about half of the total volume setting. I get about 24 when i blast it. Watching movies on it cuts the battery life by more than in half. I love the sleek stylish design of the unit. Only draw back is the short cable on the head phones. Other than that one small thing, I love it. I give this a 5 out of 5. Click here to buy the Sony Walkman 8 gb version for 199 dollars.

Intro: When i bought my ps3, I wasn’t even 100% sure of my purchase. I got it on a whim because a guy in a game store was trying to sell it back to the store and was going to get a really horrid price for it. I offered to take it off his hands for the right price. He had 2 games (motorstorm, resistance fall of man), the component cable, and 2 six axis controllers. He first asked me for 400, I was like, let me think about it for second (this was when the price for the 60gb had just dropped to $499), then he blurted out 350, I was like, “sold”, went to an atm and could only draw out 360 not 350, so I ended up giving him 360 for it. So i ended up with a 60 gig ps3 for 360 us dollars, 2 games, 2 controllers and component cable. At the time all I had was this old 36 inch analog tv. So I played it on that via svideo. Really crappy low res. Todd and I played most of resistance fall of man like this in split screen, and it was still way better than the wii I had just sold. I ended up getting a Sony XBR trinitron 34 inch hd analog tv. 1080i. And then the ps3 blew us away.

My first and second impressions of the so call new generation of consoles was a let down, my friend Steve had bought a 360, and I didn’t care for the controller and the games still didn’t look better than what I had on the pc at the time. I bought the wii to find out it was a gamecube with a new controller, and the same issues, only good first party titles, and not hardly any AAA titles out side of zelda, and mario the two gaming icons i loathe with a passion. So it offered nothing to me really. Once we got over wii sports it started collecting dust. I have never been a die hard nintendo guy, all ways more of a sega and 8 and 16 bit computer guy when it came to games. After the wii, when we got the ps3, we couldn’t believe how much more stuff was going on, on the screen with no slow down in resistance fall of man. I couldn’t get over the 40 players online, this is the most on a console ever. I struggled playing gears of war on the 360 because I hated the controller so much, but with the sixaxis I was able to get into resistance easily, and actually can play all the first person shooters on the ps3 well now thanks to the six axis. The analog sticks have more movement and degrees of sensitivity or so it seems, they are placed in a better place for my hands. and the six axis so so light.

But why the ps3 over the rest? I added up the costs, and in the end the ps3 is the cheapest High Def console with all the options installed. I wanted blueray for my hd tv, and now with netflix I rent mostly blueray at the same cost as dvd. The ps3 upscales dvds to 1080i and p very well, better than the 360, better than all my dvd players did. My regular dvds look better on the ps3 as well. I also download some japanese tv from torrents, mostly naruto and things like that. I can covert them to mp4 and transfer them over the wireless netwrok via windows media player 11, or twonkey media server on the mac. Let me tell you, watching downloaded content on my big tv smokes watching it even on a 24 inch imac. So the ps3 replaced my dvd player, gave me a blue ray in addition, lets me browse most web sites for no charge in high def. Can plug in a usb mouse and keyboard, I can install linux on it, I can upgrade the hard drive myself for cheap, not so on the 360 (you gutta buy over priced proprietary 360 crap), ps3 you just throw in a laptop hd. 360 has no web browser, and I don’t care how much better live is, no web browser is a big negative for me. I was also sold on the future of home, the current playstation network is ok, and I can download demos, and hd trailers for movies and games and that is easy to do and works great with no fee, on the ps3 its free, on the 360 it’s 50 bucks a year, so in 5 years that will cost you more than your initial purchase of the 360. What a joke. Microsoft claims to be cheaper, but they nickle and dime you for options, the network gaming with no browser is 50 bucks a year. Gotta buy a big hd well that will put you out a couple hundred, extra hundred for the wifi, extra 175 for hd dvd. no thanks. Ps3 delivers it all at a much cheaper price point. I like playstation network enough, i can play games online, look at the web, and download games and trailers for no charge. Besides, you can play online with Velvet Acid Christ, my user id on playstation network is: hexfix93 . The future is home (comes out in march 08 i think) and it looks like it will smoke xbox live, check out the videos below:

But what is the most important thing about a console? The games. The ps3 offers a much better console oriented gaming experience. The 360 is mostly PC ports and first person shooters. The ps3 offers that as well as games like uncharted: drake’s fortune, ratchet and clank, warhawk, heavenly sword, singstar, hotshots golf 5, little big planet, metal gear solid 4, Killzone 2 and more. Check out the Video below:

Let’s not forget the ps3 has the cell processor, which is 2x times more powerful than the 360’s processors. What we are seeing in the cross platform ports, well, un-optimized code that runs on a single core. The ps3 doesn’t fair to well in this regard, if you use the ps3 like a single core processor it will only yield the performance of a top end mac g4, not the g5, the g4. The 360, when it runs single core code it acts more like a p4 2.4ghz pc, so it does a better job and single thread apps. But that is not the future, all pcs are multicore now, and the ps3 has 7 cores, not 3 or 2 or 4, 7. When the code is multithreaded with optimized code to work well with the cell, it will beat even the fastest pcs on the market and out run the 360 easily.We are starting to see multi-threaded code. And yes, i know Uncharted could not be done on any other console, neither could heavenly sword or ratchet and clank. As more and more first party software comes out for the ps3, you will never see any console catch up in terms of graphics and how much stuff is going on, on the screen. Even with that said, most of the ports do run well from the pc and 360, just not as good. Who cares though, i mean i think sony’s games are better in my opinion. The future is in sony’s favor. The price will keep dropping. This console offers the most functions for the price it’s at now, and in the future, it will drop more and offer more and more. I recommend the 60 gig ps3 for people who want to play their old ps2 and ps1 games. If that doesn’t matter to you, pick up the 40 gig.

Bottom Line: PS3! Games I like more. More out of the box, not nickel and dimmed like the 360. PS3 you get blueray hd dvd, hdmi, free network and internet access, backwards compatible on some units, better controller with motion sensitivity, bigger hard drive, easy to upgrade, dvd player that upscales, web browser, psp connectivity, wifi, and the ability to use a usb mouse and keyboard on some games. The games that sold me on the system were Warhawk, Resistance fall of man, Heavenly Sword, Super Stardust HD, Call of Duty 4 (which is better on ps3), Oblivion, Jericho, and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. The games that I am looking forward to the most are, Click on names to see trailers: Final Fantasy versus, Final Fantasy 13, Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2, Little Big Planet, Unreal 3, Sould Calibur, Grand Turismo 5, Infamous.

Pricing
PS3: $399 for 40 gig ps3 hdmi, wifi, free network, blueray, 2 usb, but lacks memory card slots and backwards compatibility.

Ps3: $499 for the 80 gig with free network, software backwards compat and memory card slots and 4x usb plus blueray, wifi, hdmi.

Ps3: &499 for the 60 gig that does it all and has it all. full back wards compatible.
Look at it this way, on the ps3 you are spending 200 on the gaming console and 200 on wifi, blueray, free network for a lifetime. This is a great deal.

xbox 360: $350. small 20 gig drive, 2x usb, Some have hdmi some don’t. DVD drive. But now comes the nickel and dimming. $50 for xbox live network, $100 for wifi adapter, $175 for add on HD DVD player. so for $675 you have to pay to get it to match even the $399 ps3 in features and still have 20 gigs less space. Now tell me, is it really cheaper? oh and get a bonus, it’s called the red ring of death, yes 40% of the xbox 360’s sold will break and brick and you will have to wait up to 3 months for it to be repaired. This is why i will not probably ever buy a 360. I hate microsoft. The 360 is last gen, last gen dvd only, so no big huge games with big huge textures. only 3 cores compared to 7 on ps3, smaller hard drives, and no wifi built in, for god’s sake even the wii has built in wifi. You have to pay for online gaming, it’s free for the wii and the ps3. stupid. The 360 is a fools gaming console when compared to the ps3 or the wii. Sorry, but it breaks, and lack so many key options that are next gen.

WII: $250 with wifi, dvd, web browser, free network, good nintendo games, low def, dated, mostly ps2 ports. only games that are good are nintendo games. If this is what you like. Buy it. i don’t like it. But it is a reliable system, with some good kiddy titles.

I hope this helps you make good choices this holiday season. Stay far away from the over priced xbox that will break down on you in all likelihood. Click here to read another reason why i like sony more than nintendo and microsoft. Sony is more earth friendly.