While Sony has managed to lead the market with its Sony Walkman cassette player back in the days when cassettes were at their height, until now they have not done very well when it came to their portable digital music devices. Their first devices restricted consumers to its ATRAC3 format, however later on they started offering other attractive features such as MP3 playback, attractive design as well as very long battery life.
Sony's latest player line-up has succeeded in knocking the iPod shuffle into 2nd place on the Japanese market between May and June and has sold more than double the company's initial expectation. Between May and June, Sony's players accounted for 27% of Japan's flash player market, compared with under 20% for the iPod shuffle. Their line-up comes with a flash capacity of 256MB, 512MB or 1GB, a display (which the iPod Shuffle lacks), stylish round-edge design and a 50 hour battery life.
So far Sony's latest line-up has not done as well in Europe or the US. Sony's 20GB and 30GB hard drive versions of their latest line-up have not done as well either even in Japan, but then again they are missing the mid capacity (4GB to 6GB) range that the iPod mini comes in. Sony's next challenge will be to develop a user friendly and appealing music store / Jukebox software as so far their "Sony Connect" service has not done so well.
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Apple is still squashing Sony in Europe and North America, where a big selling point is the availability of iTunes, an easy-to-use music downloading service that has not yet been launched in Japan. Translating that success overseas will not be easy, but boosting sales in Japan is an important first step for Sony as it tries to reclaim the lead in the portable audio market it helped pioneer with the Walkman cassette player 26 years ago. "There is no question that Sony has the potential of being much more competitive," Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin said. "It could emerge as a more formidable rival to Apple over the next three years." The full article can be read here. |
Just as Sony is trying to push their music players, they are very keen on their anti-piracy technology also. For example Sony BMG
plans to copy protect all of its CD releases in the coming months, yet there is
no word if music from these discs can even be transferred to a Sony digital music player yet. Sony uses a proprietary DRM format on their players just like how Apple uses a proprietary DRM format also.
It is interesting however to see that Sony has succeeded in taking over the iPod Shuffle in Japan. Then again, while the iPod and iPod mini both get good user reactions on its ease of use, style and song capacity, quite a lot of people have begun realising just how different the iPod Shuffle is without the scroll-wheel navigation or display and only a choice between sequential and random play order. This likely also explains why iPod Shuffle sales have levelled off recently. In fact, if another brand would try and sell a flash player with no display and only buttons for volume control, next/previous track and a shuffle button, chances are that very few consumers would buy it, let alone pick it up off the shelf to have a closer look.
