“Sony Corp. unveiled its first MP3-compatible, hard disk Walkman music player on Tuesday in an attempt to recover ground lost to Apple Computer’s iPod. The world’s biggest consumer electronics maker aims to reclaim the market for portable and personal music devices, which it helped to launch 25 years ago with its first Walkman,” Lucas van Grinsven reports for Reuters.

“The product will be available in Britain before Christmas at 249 pounds ($462.70) and elsewhere in Europe in early 2005 at 369 euros ($489). The new hard disk player is the successor of Sony’s first hard disk Walkman, which it introduced this summer but which can play back only music compressed with Sony’s proprietary Atrac software. Atrac is the format Sony uses on its Internet music shop Connect, which opened in Europe this summer,” van Grinsven reports.

“Putting MP3 playback capability in the new Sony Walkman NW-HD3 means consumers can directly import and export tracks in the MP3 format, which is more popular than Atrac. Sony Europe President Chris Deering said the new Walkman was important to the success of Connect, whose performance to date he described as ‘not an entrenched recognisable service,’” van Grinsven reports. “Sony President Kunitake Ando said this summer, at the launch of the new Walkman, that he was determined to take the spotlight in the market for portable music players away from iPod. ‘I don’t know if we can take this market back in a year … But this launch is our message that we will work hard to put an end to the dominance by just one company,’ Ando then said.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Good luck to Kunitake Ando – he’s gonna need a boatload of four-leaf clovers on this one. The phrase “too little, too late” doesn’t do Sony’s situation justice. The headline we’ve chosen should tell you just about all you need to know: people want iPods, not NW-HD3s.

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Apple embarrassing Sony as iPods take Japan by storm – November 28, 2004