Sony VAIO VGF-WA1/W Wireless Digital Music Streamer

I was a little wary about purchasing since it is expensive and my wife tends to be techologically adverse. The interface set up was easier than I expected and the sound quality is excellent. My wife is moving the player from room to room without any serious difficulties. I did encounter some problems with file formats and DRM's associated with music downloaded by SonicStage that required a lenghty process to convert files to MP3 formats but once our musics files were in the correct format the system works great. For us it was worth the effort. Read and keep the instruction manual handy.

I have the WA1 and find it a pleasure to use this unit daily. The setup is fairly straight forward but expect to spend 30- 60 min's to set up depending on your existing system. The WA1 comes in a nicely configured black or white package that has a backlit touch panel on the top of the unit which goes into a sleep mode after one minute but wakes up when you approach the WA1. This is to save power when it is operated in the battery mode. In the battery mode you will get somewhere around 4-5 hours although I have never run it to that point. It does not have a battery gauge per se but it does have a flashing LED that begines to flash faster as the battery runs close to depletion. At that point you can always plug it in to recharge the battery or continue listening to music as the battery charges.
The two big features are the WA1's abilty to stream your playlists or folders from any computer in your house to the WA1 which has two speakers with remarkable sound quality. The second feature allows you to listen to Live365 web radio which is also streamed from a supplied wireless USB adapter or thru an existing 802.11 WiFi.
With the web radio you have the option of 100 comercial free stations from Live365 at no charge for a limited trial period. But for as little as $5.95 a month you can join the VIP membership and have access to thousands of radio stations from around the world. This also gives you the option of setting up your own favorites list on their website that you then can access from the WA1. The stations are shown on a display allowing you to scroll to your favorites,artist or by genres using the touch panel or the supplied IR remote control to surf thru them.
One of the best features is that the WA1 has RCA and optical outputs allowing you to feed a stereo system when stationary or take it to go anywhere within an average sized house and yard area. The WA1 has many adjustments and modes for the sounds and functionality to suit your own taste as well as a clock and an alarm clock feature if you want use it in the bedroom. All in all, I really like the WA1 and listen to the web radio nonstop as there is so much content to explore such as 50 - 60 stations per genre (with the VIP membership).
The cons: The only web radio the WA1 can access is Live365. The capabilty of the streaming music is dependent on your ISP and you could experience interuptions in your streaming web radio music if you are on a dial-up connection. There is no USB inputs to listen to music on flash drives but you can input MP3 and Ipod players. There is a 128Mb internal memory which allows you to capture songs that are streamed from your library/playlists but not from the web radio. Unfortunately there is no way to expand the internal memory size. Tech support is nearly non-existent as this product is too new to have a knowledge base for the tech support people to search thru. This unit is considered part of Sony's VAIO computer product line and therefore you end up speaking to a computer technical person.