Sony may be entering the hard disc portable music player arena, with an interesting product. I can't find any photos, but this seems like a legitimate product is on the horizon. Supposedly, Sony will officially unveil it later today. Weighing in
at just 3.8 ounces it's light enough that's for sure, couple that with these specs: palm-sized, aluminum-encased, 20-gigabyte capacity and get this, promises of 30 hours of playback on a rechargeable battery.
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Then the face-off will begin. "I'd call it an iPod challenger, and one that will keep Apple on its toes," said Richard Doherty, an industry analyst with The Envisioneering Group. Apple was not the first to introduce a high-capacity hard-disk portable music player, but its October 2001 launch of the iPod defined the market. The product's runaway success - with an estimated 3 million units sold - has since drawn other rivals, including Dell and Samsung. Still, Apple leads with about a 60 percent share of the hard-disk drive player segment in the United States, and about 30 percent of all portable music players, according to Michael Goodman, an analyst at The Yankee Group market research firm. Sony's sleek new Walkman is a highly-anticipated and belated entry but will likely be Apple's fiercest competitor yet, Doherty predicts. "These are two aging entrepreneurs who are incredibly well-driven internally to exceed what they did just the month before," he said. "It'll be great to finally have these two in the same playing field." Of course, portable music isn't new to Sony. It pioneered the category when it introduced the original Walkman in 1979. |
By iPod
challenger, surely that doesn't mean they will be using Sony's proprietary compression Atrac3, as a sole method of storing music. Let's hope this puppy can handle everything from MP3 to Ogg. Ok WMA too.
Source: My Way
