“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.
Related articles:
Mossberg: Apple iPod nano ‘beautiful, incredibly thin, and exceeds Apple’s performance specs’ – September 08, 2005
Apple’s iPod nano will make competitors whimper, Motorola’s ROKR inexplicably bland – September 07, 2005
Tech pundit Enderle: ‘iPod Nano is a hit,’ Motorola ROKR ‘simply doesn’t have enough Apple in it’ – September 07, 2005
Jupiter analyst Gartenberg: ‘the market is going to go for Apple iPod nano in a big way’ – September 07, 2005
Analyst: iPod nano ‘could be Apple’s next home run’ – September 07, 2005
Video of Steve Jobs introducing iPod nano, ROKR iTunes phone now available online – September 07, 2005
Apple’s Steve Jobs predicts ultra-thin iPod nano ‘will become the highest volume iPod in the world’ – September 07, 2005
Apple introduces iPod nano – September 07, 2005
Over 1,000 accessories now available for Apple iPod – September 07, 2005
dont u feel sorry for ’em
even a little bit
Sony calls it time machine shuffle. Apple calls it smart playlists.
Sony must now wish it had a time machine so it could go back and try to head off the iPod’s rise.
pick songs released in a certain year – ‘time machine shuffle’
you mean Sony only has one kind of smart playing list? And what’s more not even capable to pick songs in a range of years?
Lame. Is this all it can do?
Whatever.
What I don’t understand about Sony is the sheer number of players they have developed in the past year … it’s amazing … why not concentrate your resources on a few WELL THOUGHT out players instead?
Sony is adding Smart Playlists… without the Smart?
Any iPod can run a playlist by year or by most-listened-to or by favorite ratings. For years! The nano can too.
Only with iTunes, you can do a lot more than that. Sony is pre-building a couple Smart Playlists you can’t control, and calling that innovation?
BTW go check what Sony’s charging for flash players. Yikes.
radio..
not really.. they’re fscking customers by lying about storage and battery life
and they refused to *ahem adopt this wacky format called .. mp3…
64kbs.. 64kbs…64kbs..
I’m sure Sony didn’t feel sorry all those years their Walkman literally walked over other brand’s portable cassette/CD players. They dropped the ball and Apple picked it up.
What is amazing is all the money being spent (and lost) by companies like Sony, Creative, Napster, Real, etc… trying to make a windows solution work.
MW=free, as in people wouldn’t want these other players even if they were free.
Playing catch up must really suck for them. They’re too big with too many conflicting interests to compete.
The iPod Nano is going to sell like crazy in Japan. This is the perfect for the Japanese market: extremely small, looks great, and easly customizable. The only way it would sell any better over there is if it had a place for cellphone charms.
The iPod nano 4GB can hold half a billion songs!!!*
*Average song length 0.02 seconds, encoded @ 16kbps
“We will accelerate our challenge….”
A pair of Atlas rocket boosters strapped to your ass couldn’t make you accelerate enough to catch Apple’s innovation.
iPod is Coke™
All others combined are RC Cola™
There is no Pepsi™
“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.”
Question: How does one store 13,000 songs on a 20 GB hard-drive (MP3 player)? Can you imagine what the sampling size / bit rate must be?
Peace.
Why worry about the i-Pod Sony? You got “THE BEAN” baby !!
Sony’s player isn’t coming out till November, and then only in Japan?! You have got to be kidding. The iPod Nano will have sucked all the oxygen out of the MP3 player universe by then.
Whether it’s Sony or Microsoft’s big push, or Creative’s multimillion-dollar advertising rollout — it’s always “later this year” that they’ll really challenge the iPod. Every year. How many years until it’s not later this year?
(MW is “road”, as in long)
I’m sure it will be called something catchy like the “Sony WMP-8329xrp World Portable Network Music Portal Player w/ATRACplus and Connect Support” or SWPNMPPACS for short. It will also have some ergonomic nightmare of a multi-level, multi-twist, multi-push, all-in-one solution knob to annoy it’s users.
I can see it beating the Nano in the market easily. Yeah.
In related new, the fox has said the grapes were probably sour anyway.
Hey, I read that recently. About the fox and the grapes….
Derrick said: “What I don’t understand about Sony is the sheer number of players they have developed in the past year”.
Headless chickens spring to mind.
“What? Apple’s released a hot new product? Well… uh… We’re– we’re releasing one too! And ours will be more better! Ours will have lasers and warp drive and hookers and booze! You’ll see! And then Apple will be all like ‘Boo hoo hoo, we totally suck!’ And we’ll be like ‘Ha ha, we rule your ass!’ So you just watch! This ends the press conference.”
We are still waiting for them to crush VHS with the BetaMax. They lost that one as well.
The guy running the company (Howard Stringer) used to be the Executive Producer of the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. How that qualifies him to run Sony is beyond me.
It just blows me away how Apple can take something like the iPod Mini and make it look outdated. What amazes me more, is how they can take pretty much the look of the 4th gen regular iPod and use that similar style to do it. I’m fighting the urge to buy one…really hard….dammit.
That’s the grapes that will be available later this year!
really think they can overcome iPod hardware with software tweaks that don’t even surpass Apples? Even if it were better, Apple could update their software quickly.
Seems like getting into the music business made them stupid.