A reveal of the Sony Walkman E450

Just after Christmas Sony was kind enough to send me a Sony Walkman E450 to try out for a few days. When it came my daughter was most upset that it was the blue version and not the pink one she had seen online. I reminded her it could be worse as they could have sent one of the other colours (red, green, black), and that it didn't positively matter what colour as they all work the same!

I set about connecting it up to my Sony Vaio laptop and was slightly confused when it told me that I had disrupted it's connection when I hadn't been near it (nobody had) and was already writing up a negative recapitulate in my head when I thought, sod it, I'll just start using it. I unplugged it and started listening to some of the tracks that were on the E450. There was nothing I recognised, but I loved that I could convert the pitch of the music and started development use of the Karaoke function after listening to the songs for a bit. I don't positively understand how it does it, but the E450 changes the audio settings so that the vocals are quieter and the backing track at a general level meaning that Personal Karaoke is a lot of fun.

Songs Justin Bieber

The only downside on this Karaoke function is that I currently spend a lot of time telling my daughter that when she is listening to music straight through her headphones that we don't positively want to hear her singing along with it (especially when it is Justin Bieber or Hannah Montana!)

My husband let me know that it played Mp3, Wma and Wav files, but as he is the one regularly in fee of putting tunes on to the discrete devices in our house that didn't mean a lot to me. He also said that if I wished I could put lyrics on in .lrc format, but I wouldn't know where to even look for those.

My daughter has an iPod Nano and the layout of the Sony E450 was pretty similar, so we were both able to work out what we needed to do/what menu's to open to do what we wanted. In other words it was very easy to navigate and didn't confuse me (which is positively done). They were about the same size and weight, but I did feel that I was going to lose the Sony E450 down the back of the sofa as it kept slipping out of my pocket, something my iPod touch doesn't do in general because of its size!

The Sony Walkman E450 has a nice minuscule 2-inch screen, (204x320 pixels) on which if you wanted you can watch video (it supports H.264/Avc, Wmv and Mpeg-4) but to be honest I don't think anyone has the eyesight to watch videos on the screen for a long amount of time.

I did find the Fm radio tuner and voice recorder quite useful, and I also found the alarm clock quite useful for development sure that I got to school on time for the daily school run.

Overall I did like the Sony E450 and if I were in the market for a transfer music expedient for my 7 year old daughter this would assuredly be on the short list. A quick search found the E453 (4Gb) for sale at colse to £50, the E454 (8Gb) for colse to £70 and E455 (16Gb) for colse to £90 (but they were all from shop I had never heard of before!) and I think that it's positively quite good value.

A reveal of the Sony Walkman E450

Tq Paradise reveal

When I heard Tq was back on the scene oh, only a decade after his first album came out, I was quite glad. The lead single to his most recent effort Paradise was the song of the same title. Now, to be honest, I was expecting something truly great when I first read the title of the song, given that there is a song called Paradise on his first album They Never Saw Coming, and it was one hell of a track. I even remember what track amount it was. 4. That's right.

Unfortunately, the newer Paradise was desperately average, generic, poorly produced and minute in its melodies. Krayzie Bone from Bone Thugs N Harmony makes it worse, dare I say, and I am left wondering what happened to Tq over the past decade. Did his first two albums, record label errors aside, two major classics of R&B, simply such the creative juices from him?

All Songs By Justin Bieber

The second track, Soulja, is better, but is still generic and lacks that Tq 'magic' we saw in the 90's - that magic which made Baby aka Birdman, Lil Wayne and his Cash Money Millionaires buy separate copies of the They Never Saw Me coming for every state they went to, because they played it so much and ended up scratching it! It absolutely was that good. (Quite surprising, therefore, that the boys at Ca$h Money recommended that Tq become their own version of Usher, rather than staying true to his own style that they had loved so much on tour. They should have just hired Justin Bieber if they wanted that.)

The second single, S.E.X.Y, is an upbeat ode to a woman's beautiful form, and it's a nice song, in fact one of the best singles of 2008 up there with Lollipop, but with these two up there as the best you can't help but think music is becoming considerably worse. It's almost like a function of time, starting from the 90s, the more time goes by, the worse it gets. When I was growing up, Lauryn Hill and her Miseducation, The Fugees, Mariah Carey and Dreamlover - all that beautiful stuff - Busta Rhymes going crazy and his Extinction, and of course Tq and his own They Never Saw Me Coming, were all over the radio. Fast transmit ten years, and what do we have? Lady Gaga whose discography is maybe the trashiest, most annoying set of songs to have ever existed; Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez. Sure, Justin Bieber has a good voice but don't half of his songs sound like a recycled version of something else? Why am I saying all of this? Well, this is absolutely how Paradise sounds. It sounds like Tq trying to sound like his old 90's 'reality R&B' self, but he just can't do it. One fancy is that, despite his 'reality R&B' his songs in the 90's had distinctly beautiful melodies, melodies which were often the polar opposite of the hard realities they conveyed. For example, his song One Lick was a story of one final drug job gone wrong, but have you ever heard a more beautiful hook in your life! Where is that Tq?

Speaking of which, I had absolutely high hopes for track 6 on Paradise, Proud Mary. You know, anyone with the word 'Mary' in, sung by Tq, my ears are going to perk up like a dog in front of a most succulent beef brisket. However, no sweet melodies, a fairly decent song for 2008, but I can't help but feel empty at it. Ain't the Same, and I Don't Know (featuring Jagged Edge) give me a similar feeling, the previous kind of a summary of this whole album. And I Don't Know, well, let's just say that after I Remember, I unbelievable so much better of Tq and J.E.

Ebony Eyes is quite clearly the best song on the album. It doesn't sound tired, the melodies are, while not orgasmic as on They Never Saw Me Coming, relatively fresh and it just shows that Tq still has something in him, but I just get the feeling that some kind of personal tragedy may be the only thing that can force the remaining brilliance out of this man, that we all know he has. It would be selfish of me to wish ill on anybody, because Tq, anyone he does now, is still the author of some eternally classic work and even if he never repeats it, he should all the time garner respect wherever he goes. Unfortunately, it won't be for the most recent Paradise. Rating: C-

Tq Paradise reveal