Sony Electronics are hoping that their legendary Walkman brand can help them steal the lead player title off Apple in the digital music market. The technology giant yesterday confirmed it would mark the 25th anniversary of the Walkman by launching a credit card sized digital music version of the portable player built to rival Apple's hugely successful iPod. Sony hope to win favour by offering more capacity and longer battery life than the iPod at a cheaper price tag.
Just like the iPod goes hand in hand with Apple's iTunes, so the new Walkman will link up with Sony's own digital download service, Connect, which is due to launch around the world very soon. This service will sell tracks in Sony's own ATRAC file format (or codec) which is more 'compressed' than most other music file formats, hence why Sony can squeeze more tracks onto their Walkman players than Apple can on their iPods.
The Sony players will only play ATRAC files - a feature which, while providing that extra capacity benefit, some say is a great weakness. By not playing rival companies' file formats, or even the standard MP3 format, Walkman owners will have to run any music bought from anywhere other than Connect through a bit of Sony file conversion software before putting them onto their players.
The new Walkman will launch in Japan on 10 Jul, in the US in Aug and in Europe by Sep. Presumably the Connect service will go live in sync with the product launches. Whether Sony can beat Apple, who are still benefiting from being first to market with a compelling digital music proposition, remains to be seen.