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New Walkman-Branded Hard Disk Player
Darian writes "Following on the heels of Commodore's introduction of portable digital music players Sony has stepped up to the plate with their first Walkman branded product. Reuters has the story and The Register has a couple more photos. Gizmodo has an anonymous tip from a Sony insider. The NW-HD1 is a 'credit card-sized' 8.9m x 6.2 x 1.4cm unit fitted with a 20GB 1.8in hard drive. There's enough RAM on board to provide 25 minutes of skip-free playback. There's a seven-line LCD for track information and player status data. "We couldn't come up with something using the Walkman brand until it survived the 1 meter (3 ft 3.37 in) drop test," said Robert Ashcroft, senior vice president of Sony network services Europe. So digital music rights had nothing to do with it? Right. The unit is planned to undercut the iPod price point. Apple lawyers do have the upper hand with the scroll wheel." Update: 07/01 21:34 GMT by T : It's also the Walkman's 25th birthday; read on for more.
Player Blog writes "The Sony Walkman, icon of the 80s and direct ancestor of the iPod and its ilk, first hit the streets 25 years ago. I don't know if July 1, 1979 was the actual first day for the Walkman, but Sony is celebrating it today. I had one, I loved it and I thought it was the greatest invention ever. Take a trip down memory lane with the history and photos at the Walkman Museum."
Doesn't Atari's paddle controller count as prior art?
Responsibility is the punishment for compentenc
Looks very slick but my concerns are:
1. The jog wheel, looks AWFULLY small. Look at the guy's thumb on that!
2. That green-lit color screen doesn't look too friendly on the eyes.
This is going to flop pretty hard. I hope Sony doesn't invest too much in it. I'm all for players being cheaper than my iPod, but not if the quality/features suffer.
How can Sony expect this to take off using their own "special" format that can't be shared, transferred or otherwise used with other players and music stores? What's Sony thinking? Where's the logic behind this?!
According to the Yahoo article, it'll ship at about $400, undercutting Apple's 40GB iPod which retails for $499. Am I the only one here who noticed that it's not really undercutting? I mean.. I'm no Apple junkie, but $99 more for double the capacity, are we really fair saying Sony is undercutting?
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
"The NW-HD1's primary format is Sony's own ATRAC 3 Plus - other formats are converted to that mode when they're transferred over to the player."
.. I have a feeling this won't be much different (ok I conceed nothing but iTunes syncs with the iPod out of the box - but at least it handles things in standard mp3/4 rather than realaudio)
Afaik that is the same format as they use in their newer Minidisc's - and it's a BIG mistake in my opinion and not just because it needs to do on-the-fly conversions.
Simplicity would be nice.
The 'NetMD' minidiscs sucked because nothing but realplayer (still haven't forgiven them) could sync with them
Jon - TheSpork
This is a blatant attempt by Sony to get more people to use its online music service. I see a potential pitfall here. No, I actually see a white elephant for Sony. If it only plays ATRAC and every other player (IPOD included) supports the de-facto standard (MP3), it will fail in the market. Period. Are all of Sony's players ATRAC only? Why are they attaching their most recognized product name to this dud?
Proprietary standards work in segmented markets still in infancy. Like it or not people have MP3 collections and will not be keen on converting to use the device. Prediction - In 2005, Sony will release a walkman that also supports MP3.
There's a lot more now that know "MP3" as the only way to listen to downloaded or ripped music - that's why iPod supports it.
Cheaper than the iPod,
80% of the price for 50% of the capacity?
This product is a dead duck.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
There has to be some twisted logic behind this move, either an attempt to make Atrac the format of choice for digital music storage (won't ever happen) or to rigidly enforce DRM, which will just piss everyone off, especially /. types, who are also presumably early adopters of new gadgets such as this.
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"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Nah. "Walkman" was big in the 80's and 90's. iPod has the mindshare now (and I'm admitting this as a Rio Karma owner :-)
Someone else said it, and it's true: this thing doesn't play MP3, so what's the point? It's just a glorified Minidisc player.
ok?! why not compare it to the 20G iPod, being as it is that the Sony one is a 20G player as well?
the 20G iPod costs $399 as of now (and probably less when the sony is launched...).
Sure, back when tapes were all the rage, "Walkman" was the generic term for portable music. Sony has already missed the boat. These days, it's "iPod". Everybody knows what an iPod is, and what it looks like. It has become as generic as "Xerox" or "Kleenex".
Also, people who buy portable digital music players (especially expensive ones) ALREADY have thousands of songs in whatever format they like, most likely mp3. Given the choice between one that plays mp3s and one that converts to ATRAC, they will choose the mp3 player.
Sony suffers from the NIH syndrome. They insist on using ATRAC and they insist on using Memory Sticks. In the end it is the consumer who is suffering. My advice: stay away.
No, they're just the only big electronics company thats also a big music/movie business company, with an obvious huge conflict of interest which is crippling many of their electronics gadgets (this has been happening with the minidisc for years).
I think you misspelled forty. At least, that's how many "tiny" discs I'd need to replace my iPod. (Forget that the hard disk IS the player, where you'd be carrying the tiny discs AND the player with MD.)
Even with the iPod mini, there's a distinct advantage (imo) to having it all in one place, where I can shuffle through my all favorites using iTunes smart playlists. I'm just not interested in breaking my music into 1 GB chunks to accomodate the limitations of MD.
BTW, you got a price on those 1 GB blank minidiscs yet? I think that'll make this deal a little less attractive, also. It's great if this solution works for you, but it doesn't make sense to me.
And you're right -- I really miss the sound of LPs. Especially brand-new ones. You just can't beat virgin vinyl.
You're right, but so am I. Of course you can use it to fill it will illegal MP3s. And as I point out, unless you are willing to spend about $10,000, that's the only way you could fill it.
So my point once again, if you CAN use it to listen to illegally obtained music. And if it's ONLY useful if you use it for illegally obtained music, THEN WHAT'S THE POINT OF USING ATRAC?!?!
Sony!!! Give the people what they want! The ability to tranfer files freely without imediments that serve no real purpose!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Ironically, that's the same problem I found with the Rio Karma.
Yet I had nothing but a bunch of
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
More than this - for me part of the attraction of an HDD player is it can double as a portable hard drive. I actually own a minidisc portable - I use it for exactly one thing, as a one-button live recorder, and it works really pretty good at that (for battery life, size and ease, compared to others I've tried). But because of Sony's blinkered insistence on confounding the potential of their hardware, it is fundamentally just an analog recording device for my purposes. Post recording basically all I can do is output analog via the headphone jack - sorta stupid, IMHO. As I said, at the time I bought it it came out best comparing price point, sound quality, size/weight, battery life, media capacity, and simplicity. It beats microtape recorders hands down. I imagine HDD based recorders that write (I would hope) straight to WAV files will come around price wise.
But if I'm going to drop a fair piece of change on an HDD recorder (and I'm not yet convinced I need one) I want to be able to put data OF WHATEVER FORMAT I WANT on it. I can at least sort of justify the price then.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
No one wants to use Atrac.
I used a Sony Minidisc for about a year until I grew tired of the ultimately CRAPPY quality of the Sony Software. It literally took 6-7 minutes to import, convert, and transfer just 10 songs to the device, using a 2ghz, high-end system at the time. And that is when the program didnt crash all by itself.
And then, there is no 'one click transfer/convert'. You had to import all your mp3's into the 'library', which made another physical copy of the file, then it converts it, and saves the Atrac to your hard drive, yet again.
When will companies learn that we do not want DRM, or custom formats.
You're right, it's worse. Try to load an mp3, and it converts it into Atrac3Plus. By definition, it MUST sound worse after this, because you've compressed/decompressed it twice using lossy methods. It's akin to opening saving a TIFF as a JPEG, and saving it back to JPEG again.
Also, every comparison I've seen rates Atrac(and all its variants) well below AAC, or doesn't bother to rate it at all, given how only Sony uses it, and only sony seems insistent on forcing it on customers who really don't want it- virtually every Sony product to use it has been a dismal failure(witness MiniDisc).
Please help metamoderate.