“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
