Sony strikes back with new line of Walkman
There’s no company who would want Apple as the king of portable mp3 players. Sony on Thursday took the wraps off a new line of Walkman portable audio players, which the company says offers features not found in competing devices. Five new Walkman models will debut before the end of the year, offering capacities up to 4GB. The players are shaped like a small perfume bottle, with the high-end model priced at 29,000 yen ($240) in Japan. But Sony acknowledges it has a long way to go if it wants to unseat Apple.

“Sony has a lot of strengths that Apple doesn’t have,” said Hiroshi Yoshioka, senior vice president of Sony’s audio division in a press conference Thursday. “This is a device that takes advantage of them.” Yoshioka added that Sony expects to double its market share from 10 to 20 percent. The new Walkman lineup includes the ability to upload music directly from a CD player, as well as a built-in noise cancellation feature. Battery life is just three hours after only three minutes of charging, and the players come in four colors. The design looks pretty stylish on the first pictures, functions should be also better than in case of iPod, so we will see how will this gadget succeed. Do you still have the old sony cassette walkman somewhere in the garbage? I do!

Comments(9)
“offering capacities up to 4GB”
wooooow. :-#
It won’t be long before this is in the garbage as well.
nobody likes cassettes cassettes except me ,
lol, This new walkman seems pretty boring and generic, they need to go back to their roots and make something really original like back when they made the first walkmans. They also gotta bring back that old feature of dual headphone jacks, i sure miss that. They should also make it possible to rip songs off the am/fm radio, maybe even implement satellite radio into them sometime in the future. There’s alot of potential for them with such a well known brand name but i guess they are lazy.
Good article but in this case microsoft and apple
are the two main competetors.
the zune
[img]http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.engadget.com/media/2006/09/zune-colors.jpg[/img]
will problably be the end for sony in when it comes to storage capacity and functions check the specifications
WiFi, 30GB of HDD, built-in FM, a 3-inch screen and the basic music, pictures and video playback
I dont know. I like sony’s current flash based 2gig sports walkman for a flash drive. I’m not a person who needs all his music on one device at all times, espeacially on a non-flash one where I cant even take to the gym or at work. So “4 gigs WOWWW” is actually kind of a nice deal.
Oh. and Ipod Nanos are fucking distgusting looking.
haha, but i won’t buy 4 gigs for over 200 bucks, nonono. i don’t want the stupid end of the deal, thx sony.
@chill:
as for the zune. you forgot to mention viral DRM, you get that for free, too.
$240 for a 4gig player? Fuck that. I paid that for my 20gig Dell DJ more than 2 years ago. Sony will never gain a market share with that crap. Overpriced and no storage space. That’s just bad business.
[...] Via: RLSLog [...]
Wow. That looks like a piece of shit. I hate Ipod fanboys and those little turds who like to show off the fact that they own IPod’s to EVERYONE around them, but damnit, Ipods are sexy. This thing looks like a car stereo throwback from the 80’s.