Slashdot Mirror
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."
Yup thanks to the previous slashdot http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/2 3/0044259&mode=thread&tid=133&tid=134&tid= 186 the poster did the unit conversion coreectly.
How many people went and checked the conversion.
100cm/2.54cm/in=39.370079 (thanks xcalc)
Sorry Dave I cant do that
The hard-drive based walkman's being developed under the codename "iPod".
"I'll dig up the listening test article later"
Translation:
I want to get some karma, and later I want to get some more.
The full text of this article from The Economist follows. The original content is subscriber-only; it is reproduced here in the hope and expectation that you will find it useful.
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RATIONAL CONSUMER
The meaning of iPod
Jun 10th 2004
From The Economist print edition
Consumer electronics: How Apple's iPod music-player and its imitators are changing the way music is consumed
WHAT is the meaning of iPod? When Apple, a computer-maker, launched its pocket-sized music-player in October 2001, there was no shortage of sceptical answers. Critics pointed to its high price--at $399, the iPod cost far more than rival music players--and to the difficulty Apple would have competing in the cut-throat consumer-electronics market. Worse, Apple launched the iPod in the depths of a technology slump. Internet discussion boards buzzed with jokes that its name stood for "idiots price our devices" or "I prefer old-fashioned discs."
Such criticisms were quickly proven wrong. The iPod is now the most popular and fashionable digital music-player on the market, which Apple leads (see chart). Apple has been unable to meet demand for the latest model, the iPod mini. On the streets and underground trains of New York, San Francisco and London, iPod users (identifiable by the device's characteristic white headphone leads) are ubiquitous. Fashion houses make iPod cases; pop stars wear iPods in their videos. The iPod is a hit.
Its success depends on many factors, but the most important is its vast storage capacity. The first model contained a five gigabyte hard disk, capable of holding over 1,000 songs. The latest models, with 40 gigabyte drives, can hold 10,000. Before the iPod, most digital music players used flash-memory chips to store music, which limited their capacity to a few dozen songs at best. Apple correctly bet that many people would pay more for the far larger capacity of a hard disk. Apple's nifty iTunes software, and the launch of the iTunes Music Store, from which music can be downloaded for $0.99 per track, also boosted the iPod's fortunes.
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It is easy to dismiss the iPod as a fad and its fanatical users as members of a gadget-obsessed cult. But the 3m or so iPod users worldwide are an informative minority, because hard-disk-based, iPod-like devices are the future of portable music. According to In-Stat/MDR, a market-research firm, iPods account for 22% of digital music-players overall, but 71% of hard-disk-based players (see chart), the fastest-growing segment: over the next five years their sales will grow by 45% a year, overtaking flash-based players during 2005. So what iPod users do today, the rest of us will do tomorrow. Their experience shows how digital music-players will transform the consumption of music.
Professor iPod speaks
Few people know more about the behaviour of iPod users than Michael Bull, a specialist in the cultural impact of technology at the University of Sussex in England. Having previously studied the impact of the cassette-based Sony Walkman, he is now surveying hundreds of iPod users. Their consumption of music, he says, changes in three main ways.
The first and most important is that the iPod grants them far more control over how and where they listen to their music. Surely, you might ask, an iPod is no different from a cassette or CD-based player, since you can always carry a few tapes or discs with you? But most people, says Dr Bull, find that if none of the music they are carrying with them fits their mood, they prefer not to listen to music at all. The large capacity of a hard-disk-based player does away with this problem. The right music can always be summoned up depending on your mood, the time of day, and your activity, says Dr Bull. As a result, iPod users tend to listen to particular music duri