Instead of bulking up its latest Walkman, Sony's trimming down with a media player that measures just 0.28 inches.
The Walkman A-Series is Sony's thinnest Walkman yet. It's also quite light, weighing 2.2 ounces, Gizmodo reports. It'll be released on October 31 in Japan, with no word on availability elsewhere.
Aside from its form factor, the A-Series shares a lot of the features of its fellow Walkmen (including the Mickey Mouse playback controls of the S- and E-Series). There's noise cancellation, an FM tuner, and TV out. Videos are played on a 2.8-inch OLED screen, and battery life is said to be 29 hours for audio and 9 hours for video.
One unique feature auto-transcodes video files when dragging and dropping from a computer, coming in handy when the codec of your video file doesn't match the codecs Sony supports.
For the most part, though, the Series-A Walkman is a fairly straightforward, no-frills audio and video player with a tiny footprint. There was a time when I questioned Sony for sticking with this approach, given that the trend is clearly toward app-based, Wi-Fi enabled devices. But with Microsoft's new Zune HD taking heat for being slow to introduce apps and games, I question whether Sony would be fit to even entertain the concept.
So perhaps Sony should stick to what it knows and keep offering audio devices. Even so, the high price point of the Walkman A-Series -- in Yen, the equivalent of $226 for 16 GB, $332 for 32 GB and $443 for 64 GB -- will do little to sway consumers from the almighty iPod.
