Sony Walkman 2004
Posted by jen August 31st, 2004 in Jeneral.The new Sony Walkman is out, a 20 GB music player wit 120 hours of battery life about the same size as the iPod. Sounds pretty impressive, need to look up the stats and reviews (like I’d ever ditch my iPod, shyeah right) too bad the ads don’t make it at all attractive.
The for some reason decided to take Apple’s lead of having people singing cover songs listening to the player - and made the person Macy Gray, possibly the worst singer/retard/dope fiend/weirdo out of rehab currently work ing music industry thanks probably to some Music Agent running into her singing for smack on the street.
If she could sing, remotely it’s would be a better ad. Too bad it’s not.
You can see the video for yourself in all it’s crapulence in the link above, and with some clicking around here (damn Flash and absence of direct links!)
I think Sony also jumped on the Mp3 player bandwagon YEARS too late to ever “kill” the iPod.
Their days as THE mobile music appliance company is over. They have a huge monster to fight now, and we all know how the Japanese respond to big mucking monsters.
Walter Mossberg wrote “One major downside of the new Walkman is that it can’t play MP3 files, or any of the other standard formats. It can play back only a proprietary Sony format called ATRAC3, or a variation called ATRAC3plus.”
Oh, sure. Like I’ll convert my entire MP3 collection now.
Yeah, the absence of mp3 playback pretty much dooms this player. Note, that’s even more of a killer than the proprietary ATRAC3 format they’re sticking with, because after all, the iPod won’t play Windows Media format files, and the other players won’t play Apples AAC. But none of the rest were daft enough to shut out mp3, which, like it or not from a digital-right perspective, is the dominant format. (Sony has a history of doing stuff like this: Beta videotape, Memory Stick–the only time it worked was with the PlayStation, but then platform-specifics work great for videogame systems).
Totally agree on Macy Gray. Near-zero talent, almost like a freakshow act.