Hitting Sony's Tokyo Walkman press launch
Completely by accident, if you can believe that, we found ourselves at Sony's press launch for their new Walkman players in Tokyo this evening. Eschewing the Jobs approach of building things up with a presentation before whipping out the goods at the end, Sony simply had a troupe of models walking around from the get-go showing off the new hard disk players, the NW-A1000 and NW-A3000. Unfortunately for them, it seemed like most of the several hundred guests were music journalists more interested in the chance to see Franz Ferdinand play some songs from their new album, and Franz rather stole the new Walkmans' thunder.
Read on for a few shots of the festivities.
[UPDATE: Seems we maligned Sony by implying they hadn't done a launch presentation—we had cadged an invitation from Sony Music to the Franz live performance and didn't get wind of the Walkman launch, so, er, seems we just turned up too late. We've apprised SME of our interest in gadgets for next time.]
Franz Ferdinand, who were in Tokyo for 28 hours to film a commercial for Sony, play six songs, and get asked a few daft questions by the MC.
The NW-A3000 in its two colour variations.
The NW-A3000 clutched in our hot little hand. It?s a pretty solid piece of kit, at 182g, and that finish is going to show fingermarks even worse than a PSP.
The NW-A1000. Oddly, it felt impressively small even though its dimensions on paper wouldn?t suggest that.
