“Analysts say Sony poses the biggest challenge yet to the iPod, although they add that Apple should still be up to the challenge of defending a market that has become a key part of the company’s overall success,” Benny Evangelista writes for The San Francisco Chronicle.
“‘We think this is the year Sony starts breathing down Apple’s neck in music,” said technology analyst Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group. ‘Customers who look to the iPod as the only advanced styling and fashion statement out there are going to take more than a second look at the Walkman.’ Sony made wearing headphones in public fashionable and introduced the concept of a purely personal stereo system that could be enjoyed anywhere, from the street to libraries to public transit. The Walkman line broadened into several generations of products that played tapes, the radio and CDs,” Evangelista writes.
“Apple’s marketing prowess pushed the iPod and the smaller iPod Mini past the Walkman to become pop culture’s new slick, cool portable music device. Apple, which had been solely a computer-maker, is now known as much for music. Its online iTunes Music Store has sold 95 million songs, and Apple has sold more than 2 million iPods,” Evangelista writes.
“Last week, Sony introduced a silver, 20-GB model called the Walkman NW- HD1. The player, due to hit store shelves in the United States and Japan in mid-August, will weigh about 4 ounces and cost about $400, the same price as the 5.6-ounce iPod with the same size hard drive. Sony officials also tout the NW-HD1’s 30-hour battery life, compared with eight hours for the iPod,” Evangelista writes.
“The new Walkmans and Pocket Players will tie in to Sony’s SonicStage music management program, which can play songs encoded in the popular MP3 and Windows Media formats on the computer. However, the program has to convert songs to Sony’s proprietary Atrac3 format, the only file type the portable players will support,” Evangelista writes. “‘Are they going to kill Apple? Absolutely not,’ said Van Baker, a vice president at research firm GartnerG2. ‘If Sony Connect is compared to iTunes, there ain’t no comparison. It’s hard to argue with Apple’s success. Right now, the business model is to use your music to sell your hardware.’
“Doherty said he believes Apple and Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs have ‘several things in the fire’ to keep Sony’s Walkman from outrunning the iPods,” Evangelista writes. “‘No one on the planet dares ignore Steve Jobs,’ Doherty said. Consumer electronics-makers like Sony and Panasonic have ‘a fear of what he sees that they’ve missed.'”
Much more in the full article here.
wow that’s just really sad. sony uses 132 and then they pretend to use only 48!
i bet they lie about the battery too then.
its OK viridian. premature may startle me but as long as the guys(gals) mouth is still working i aint gonna complain :p
What a coincidence! I just got my braces off too.
*sigh* Well, I guess I’ve had enough witty banter for one day; I’m a bit tired. I’ll just go sit quietly and lick my eyebrows now.
[steps backwards out of the room, quietly closing the door]
BuriedCaesar,
Thanks! I’m still laughing as I type this! That was great!
The comparison on player alone will not suffice. The power of Apple comes from combination of iPod, iTunes and iTMS. So comparing against Sony’s player, Sonic Stage and Sony Connect, Apple wins hands down at this point. It would take Sony a long time to even pull level.
And as we know, Apple is not standing still in this market. They are adding in new features all the time.
I am seeing so many more people with iPod these days. So as long as Apple defends/improves their market share, they will enjoy first mover’s advantage for a long time to come.
>I’ll just go sit quietly and lick my eyebrows now. [Viridian]
LOL — 10 points!
if u can reach ur eyebrows that’s even better than the mike’s hard lime ads
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(covers herself up until ceaser has the door shut. cant a girl get some privacy!)
This Line:
“Apple’s marketing prowess pushed the iPod and the smaller iPod Mini past the Walkman to become pop culture’s new slick, cool portable music device.”
Yup. They’re all about the same, can’t hardly tell ’em apart. But Apple’s MARKETING PROWESS sure dragged the iPod across the finish line ahead of everyone else.
(eat my shorts)
david vesey
The iPod keeps getting more useful. This could be huge!
(from Time magazine)
Found in Translation
Searching for a bathroom in Tokyo, but don’t speak Japanese? You can stop flipping frantically through that Berlitz dictionary and fumbling with awkward pronunciations. An easier solution is now as close as your Apple iPod, thanks to a new set of foreign-language programs available from an online service at talkingpanda.com.
Talking Panda’s software can be downloaded into the iPod. It provides more than 300 commonly used phrases, which are instantly organized into categories such as “dining,” “shopping,” “emergency” and “making friends.” You can access the needed phrases in English using the touch-wheel scroll device and then clicking on the sentence you want. The translation appears on the screen and is also recited clearly through your headphones.
Downloads are cheap-just $10 each-but so far language options are limited to French, Spanish and Japanese. And the software works only on new, third generation iPods using Mac OS X version 10.2 or later (a Windows version is promised soon).
Does anyone else remember ATRAC by thinking “8-Track”?