Recently a gadget-fever hit me real hard and my Sony collection added some new and older Sony tech. The new ones include HMP-A1 - Sony’s first ever MP3 player, Video and Photo viewer; VGF-AP1L - Vaio Pocket, and DSC-M1 a funky cell-phone looking camera that shoots great MPEG4 movies and some crisp pictures too. The older generation Sony toys were PHD-A55 Sony’s Digital Photo CyberFrame and PLM-A55 Sony’s Glasstron. The latter too though were released back in 1999, but believe it or not still look cool and in high demand on Ebay.

In this post I thought I would share some comments on each of those, but not at once. I am also planning to compare the HMP-A1 and VAIO Pocket.
For now I am gonna post some preliminary pics of HMP-A1. It is a 20 Gig hard drive based player, that has a very crisp 3.5 LCD and produces some really nice image quality. Sony only introduced it in Japan, but luckily it has a full English interface (got it from Dynamism). I guess they decided to probe the West with its VAIO Pocket that supports only music playback and I am very positive that there is a VAIO Video player in the works that will replace VAIO Pocket soon (most likely Sony is waiting on video iPod introduction to strike back with some VAIO OLED based Video player - just my guess).
So bear with me, I will be updating this post with my comments and hopefully hear back from you or answer your questions. I will need some time to play with all the toys to give you an overall review.
So anyways here are some pics of HMP-A1 (listed on Groovy’s main page as one of droolworthy toys :wink: )

The Box of course (Sony’s packaging is always an A++++)

The HMP-A1 sitting on its carrying case (made of a neat material!):

Some controls located on top of the device:

And my favorite pic of it:

Some specs in Japanese, but you will get an idea anyways:

I will describe the functions and its neat interface later on (GUI similar to CLIE VZ90 and PSP). I just upgraded the firmware and the software it comes with (HMP Image Transfer Manager and MusicMatch Jukebox).

OK, more to come in a week….  :wink:

Brilliant! So the HMP-A1 is finally here!!! Could you provide some nice shots of the UI? Looking forward to a side-by-side pictorial of HMP-A1 and VGF-AP1L. Thanks for sharing Stan!

I purchased the HMP-A1 last November and i sold it to a friend a few months ago.

Its a really cool device, i mainly used it to watch music videos when i was travelling. In regards to videos, its cool cos you can change the quality improving it which increase the file size and vice versa.
I didnt like that there was no playlist or random selection with the videos.
So once it finished i would have to manually select another one.
Speed of transferring was quick if you transferred a video without changing the quality. A 60 meg video took 6-10 seconds to transfer.

For the MP3 part of it. It doesnt half half the features of a standard MP3 player.

Remote control which is provided is very weak and cheap. This is a expensive little gadget, so the least they could have done was given a decent remote.

Well i know there were other issues, but like i mentioned i sold it a few months ago and cannot remember.

Thank You
Zak

Hi, I replied to you in the other post. I would think USB 1.0 should work with it, I need to try it. Also make sure that the HMP-A1 is not set on Hold when you try to access it.