"Sony President Kunitake Ando said this summer, at the launch of the new Walkman, that he was determined to take the spotlight in the market for portable music players away from iPod." [Via CNet]

Sony takes on iPod with new hard disk Walkman>


AMSTERDAM--Sony unveiled its first MP3-compatible, hard disk Walkman music player on Tuesday in an attempt to recover ground lost to Apple Computer's iPod.

Sony is trying to once again out do the undisputed champ of personal music players (the iPod). It realizes it's proprietary music format (ATRAC) is not catching on as they would like, therefore they have integrated support in the new player (which costs more than a 20gig iPod) for MP3 audio. In turn this will appeal to the much needed audience Sony desperately needs to tap into if they are serious about coming on top in the battle of personal music players.

The device comes in five colors, plays 2.5 times longer on one battery charge than iPod's 12 hours, and can contain 10,000 to 13,000 songs, at least twice as many as an iPod because of Atrac's better compression technology.


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