Sony has traditionally adopted a bit of a pompous stance with its portable music players, refusing to fall in line with the rest of the industry when it comes to adopting current standards. Despite this, the tech giant has produced some fantastic devices in the past by focusing on getting the important things right rather than adopting the ‘fill it full of features' mentality of much of the competition.

Last summer we reviewed the NW-A806, an excellent device that rather belatedly introduced video playback to the range. This time we're looking at the NWZ-A815, which has rather belatedly introduced drag and drop, the absence of which was our biggest complaint about the previous model.

To begin with, you might notice that nothing much has changed in the design of this new player, which still apes the dimensions of the old Apple iPod Nano. A simple directional pad, two control buttons and a side-mounted volume control make it pretty easy to navigate and, since we had no problems with the old method, we've got no problem with Sony neglecting to revise it.

From the main menu you can choose audio, video or photo playback or enable the clock display. Media control features which proved so popular in the past are still here, including an intelligent shuffle that'll either pick a track at random, or choose a year from the ID3tags on your audio files to play tunes from a specific era. You can also search for an artist by initial, or setup and recall playlists from this screen.

One of the biggest advantages of the player is the degree of control you have over your media. If you're viewing video you can choose the aspect ratio and orientation, and for photos set up slideshows and interval timings. It's the audio control that really impresses, though, where you can choose a pre-set or custom equalizer and select one from a range of VPT surround settings.

You'll find other modes such as Sound Enhance, which claims to restore high-range sound removed by audio compression; Clear Stereo, which enables individual left and right processing of digital sound; and a Dynamic Normalizer to equalize volume between tracks. What all of this means is that the potential audio quality from the player is unquestionably among the best around. Sony even provides you with some very nice in-ear ‘buds, which are better than most you'll find in a box with an audio player.

Video and photo playback has also been enhanced over the old range with an even more impressive 2-inch display, which does a fantastic job of rendering even fast-moving images sharply with vibrant colours. Unfortunately we had some issues with establishing a compatible video format for the player, and to make things worse the biggest improvement to the player has thrown a bit of a fly into the ointment.

The omission of SonicStage and the adoption of drag and drop for your audio is a long overdue inclusion, but unfortunately you'll now find no bundled software for encoding video to the MPEG-4 format that the player supports. You'll need to dig out some third-party software to do this then, or learn how to do it for free using tools like VirtualDub.

Despite this, the unparalleled playback performance from the NWZ-A815 and the fact it gets the little things right - such as the ability to browse around without stopping your music, nice integration of the various features and the way you can browse by title, album art or video thumbnail - make it a true joy to use. You can squeeze over 30 hours of audio playback and around 7 hours of video from a full battery, and best of all it's well priced.

The NWZ-A815 isn't perfect, but it's damn near close. If you're primarily looking to listen to audio you won't find a more adaptable, better performing or more usable media player on the shelves today.