“The iPod may finally have a serious competitor. The company that brought us the Walkman is entering the hard disk music player arena now dominated by its trendsetting-rival Apple Computer Inc.,” May Wong reports for Associated Press.
“Sony Corp. plans to unveil Thursday its newest Walkman, a palm-sized, aluminum-encased player that can store up to 13,000 songs on its 20-gigabyte, 1.8-inch hard drive, and promises 30 hours of playback on a rechargeable battery,” Wong reports. “Weighing 3.8 ounces, the new Sony NW-HD1 is smaller and lighter than the iPod’s 15-, 20- and 40-gigabyte models, and just slightly larger than the 4-gigabyte iPod Mini. Sony claims the portable player is the smallest of its class. The product will be available in mid-August for less than $400, Sony said.” Full article here.
Sony’s measurement is based on songs encoded using its ATRAC3 (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding for MiniDisc 3) compression system at the relatively low rate of 48Kbps while Apple’s measurement is based on the AAC compression system at 128Kbps. At the same bit rate, the Walkman can store around half as many songs as the iPod, which is consistent with it having half the storage capacity… The Walkman supports only Sony’s ATRAC3 compression format, versions of which are used with Sony’s MiniDisc players and its recently-launched Windows-only ‘Connect’ online music store. Music files encoded in other formats, such as MP3, first have to be converted to ATRAC3 before they can be played and software to accomplish this is included. Transcoding typically results in some reduction in quality,” Martyn Williams reports for IDG News Service.
MacDailyNews Take: Yawn.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple iTunes Music Store vs. Sony Connect is no contest, Apple wins with ease – May 09, 2004
NY Times pans Sony Connect debut: ‘maybe they ought to call it Sony Disconnect’ – May 05, 2004
Sony will not succeed with this product. Sony is always scrambling to make an exciting product. They try something new then dump it. i.e. Clie, Aibo, and the Mini Disc. Although they still support all of these products it comes in the market with hype, promotion, support then it dies. Sony wants to be the exclusive in an inclusive market. You can use anything on a PC. There are hundreds of portable music players. iPod is a brand a strong brand that people want to be apart of not just to have something like a iPod. This is not a CD player, or Beta. This is a music player that works with an exclusive service connected to it. Didn’t Sony just come out with a high capacity Mini Disc. That was supposed to be all the rave, now they just abandoned that for something else. Bad interface and no support. Sony real competition will not be iPod but it will be the hundreds of other players that are competing in an anything goes PC market.
Look at the standards employed by different vendors.
Apple claims you can put 10,000 songs in 40 GB.
Sony claims you can put 13,000 songs in 20 GB.
And they are just making use of the ignorance of the people to sell their music player. The 30+ hours of battery is when you run at the lowest kbps (48 kbps)…
It is like how Intel removed the MHz from their processor.. just a few weeks from now, we will have iPod killers that will not mention their hard-drive capaicty but tout on the number of songs that they can hold (without telling at how low a quality it could be).
iPod is a zombie. Proof: It’s been killed by scores of iPod killers and yet keeps getting stronger and stronger.
Shut up Finland!
I guess we know who’s a troll here.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” /> By the way, anyone notice that the Sony/McDonald’s promo is gone already? Or was that just here in L.A.?
In order for this to beat up the iPod, it’s gonna have to be better in some aspect. The only place I see it being superior is in the battery life. It doesn’t have a better price, so cheap-ass consumers won’t buy. It doesn’t have a larger capacity drive, although it’ll hold more low quality songs. I doubt it’ll have a better interface. The Walkman name is known, but is certainly not popular or “cool” with the 18-35 generation that is most likely to buy. So, considering that most people don’t listen to their music device for more than 8 hours at one time, the iPod’s batteries seem to be fine.
Time will tell.
Hey, an MP3 player that doesnt play MP3’s – sounds DOA to me!
the thing might well suck, but Joe McConnel makes a fair point. Most people know jack about file compression/encoding, so things like that won’t matter to them. And Sony could always change their mind(s) and get the thing to play MP3’s.
Interesting that someone mentioned BetaMax. Yea it was better, and it got crushed by a vastly inferior format/product. Being the best doesn’t guarantee anything…
Can Sony’s device work with iTunes? If not, what other online music stores will Sony devices be compatible? How do the other online stores match up with iTunes?
Thurrot is ordering two ’cause his Dell caught a cold.
People who are ignorant enough to buy the new piece of crap Walkman Sony is trying to sell aren’t going to buy it with a $400 price tag. They’re going to wait for a drop in price to say, about $20 or so. (They would have to be that ignorant.)
Sony’s strategy doesn’t sound very positive to me: Degrade the music by increased compression, thus having more space for degraded songs and less battery consumption.
Whatever happened to making a better mousetrap? What next? Another doubling of capacity with 24kbit encoded music, followed by 12kbit, 6, 3, 1.5 … ? The winner will only store IDTags — Version 1.1 at that.
Expecting the name ‘WalkMan’ to help is also very na�ve. It would be different if they had been first to market with a compelling mp3 player — the publicity would have been worth eight figures and the name might have stuck. As it is, it only points to how badly Sony has dropped the ball in this market. Why? Confusion due to being in the content business too.
I think they ought to dump the mini disc idea and come out with a Beta-mini tape. *sarcastic* They might succeed.