26 years after Sony introduced the original, cassette-based Walkman, the company is dusting off one of the world's most famous brands for a new portable audio player - or players, to be exact. Attempting to stand out from the crowd through advances in software and hardware, the new Walkman range will initially be comprised of the NW-A1000 and NW-A3000 models which only differ in storage and display sizes.
Boasting a 2-inch organic EL display which appears to blend with the surface of the player, the NW-A3000 supports both ATRACT3+ and MP3 formats, shipping with Sony's new Connect Player software which offers music management and direct ties to Sony's Connect online music store. Additionally, the new software will allow owners of the Walkman range to automatically perform software upgrades and introduce support for new codecs.
The NW-A1000, meanwhile, bears the same physical design as the NW-A3000, with the exception of its display being 1.5 inches and its storage capacity 6 GB as opposed to the 20 GB of the NW-A3000.
Once switched on, a 'Home' menu appears offering nine different options that can be selected via a four-way directional button. These include 'Music Library', 'Play Mode', 'Initial Search', 'Intelligent Shuffle', 'Favorite 100', 'Play History', 'Settings', 'Playlist' and 'Now Playing'.
Music can be searched in a variety of ways, via 'Genre', 'Artist', 'Album', 'Song', 'Release Date', 'Rating' and 'Recently Transferred', with the Walkman also offering an 'Initial Search' feature which lets users scroll through music from A-Z. Furthermore, a new 'Artist Link' function takes advantage of the same search function in a bid to offer suggestions of artists and bands closely linked to the genre of music being played at the time.
Two new shuffle functions are also present, including 'My Favorite Shuffle', where the Walkman will select its music from the 100 most popular songs, whereas a 'Time Machine Shuffle' function randomly selects a year and plays all of the songs from that particular year that are currently held on the device.
The 20 GB Sony Walkman NW-A3000 is available in violet and silver, whereas the 6 GB Walkman NW-A1000 comes in the additional colours of pink and blue. Information concerning the expected pricing of the players was not available at the time of press.
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