Sony’s new video walkman
On Thursday Sony introduced a new version of its Sony Walkman, which includes the ability to play digital video. This will be available in September and it will be the latest potential rival to Apple’s iPod. It will support an open platform, meaning that it will be able to play a variety of music formats such as MP3 and Microsoft’s WMA. Therefore the user will have more choices for downloading and managing their music and video collections online. With this in mind, Sony plans to pull the plug on its Connect Music Services, which distributes music in Sony’s proprietary ATRAC audio format in North America and Europe. While the timing on this will vary, the move is not going to happen before March 2008. All of this is in a move towards the Sony Walkman whose battery life will allow up to 9 hours of video playback. This is going to cost between $140 and $230.
Sony made this announcement amid speculation that Apple is going to introduce new versions of it iPod media players next month. This speculation is due to the fact that Apple has distributed invitations to a September 5th event that will take place in San Francisco. However, they did not say what would take place there at that time.