With a little help from my friends, Part 3 - Beni the MP3 player

Name: Beni
Name meaning: Crimson
First seen: right before I bought him
Bought: June 2005 at the MP3 player and keitai (cellphone) shop right outside the 'Denki Town' exit of Akihabara JR Station
Model: Sony Walkman NW-HD5 R
Price paid: 34,000 yen
Colour: red
HDD: 20GB
Software: Some horrid Sony crap called SonicStage that is a bitch to use. Oh, and it is only compatible with the Japanese version of Windows. What's with that?
Battery life: 40hrs. This is of course only if you don't turn it on and off, and if you don't skip tracks. Functional battery life = more like 20 hrs (which is still better than iPod I believe).

Comments: I bought this MP3 player because it has certain advantages over current iPods. Firstly - it has a 20GB HDD yet comes in a colour that is not white. Yay! Also, it is smaller than the 20GB iPod, more the size of a 4GB iPod. But the software is crap: yet again Sony shows that their software team is not up to the standards of their hardware team. There is one other problem: sometimes Beni freezes and I have to pull the battery out and reinsert it. Overall, I like Beni. But I procrastinate something awful when it is time to load more music onto him. Fighting with SonicStage is not my idea of a good time.

As an aside, this model did not sell very well even here in Japan where everything is supposed to sell well. Sony quite quickly released a new 20GB MP3 player in a 'cuter' design. But that player is quite a bit bigger than Beni. I'm not sure I would like to lug it around in my pocket. They have also released a 5GB (?) version of that new MP3 player, that is only slightly smaller than my Beni. I wonder how the sales of the 'cute version' are? Since Japan loves cute, it is probably selling well.

(The picture above was taken with my cellphone. Maybe I will take a better picture later).