“Sony Corp. said on Thursday it would sell advanced Walkman portable music players later this year, aiming to move out of Apple Computer Inc.’s shadow in a market the Japanese company created a quarter of a century ago,” News 1 New Brisbane reports.

“The announcement comes hours after Apple unveiled the pencil-thin ‘iPod nano’ digital player and a long-anticipated mobile phone that plays music in a bid to extend its domination of the market. ‘Our previous models have been well accepted by customers in Japan and the United Kingdom. But we are not at all satisfied with where we are now,’ said Koichiro Tsujino, Co-President of Connect, a Sony unit which makes portable music players and offers online music distribution services. ‘I understand a certain company made an announcement earlier today. We will accelerate our challenge with these new models,’ he told a news conference,” News 1 New Brisbane reports.

“Sony’s new models will add the ability to automatically select and play the songs a user listens to most, and also to pick songs released in a certain year — a function Sony calls the ‘time machine shuffle.’ The new models will go on sale in Japan on November 19 and Sony, which introduced the first Walkman in July 1979, aims to launch them overseas by the end of the year… The 20 GB hard-disk model, capable of storing up to 13,000 songs, is expected to retail at around 35,000 yen in Japan, Sony said,” News 1 New Brisbane reports.

Full article here.
Sony Connect’s Co-President Koichiro Tsujino is holding news conferences. Can you imagine Steve Jobs with a Co-CEO? That wouldn’t be a survivable job, we’d venture to guess. How many presidents does an also-ran portable music player/online music outfit need, anyway? Anyway, Koichiro Tsujino is holding news conference, so we’ve decided to hold our own impromptu news conference:

Ahem… Sony, it’s over. You’ve lost.
Thank you all for coming and enjoy the rest of your day.

[Note: Sony's ridiculous song capacity claims are based on: Estimated at 4 minutes per song compressing in ATRAC3plus at 48-Kbps. Source: Sony. That's great, if you like AM radio quality. Apple's realistic song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding.]

Advertisement: Apple iPod nano. 1,000 songs. Impossibly small. From $199. Free shipping.

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