Sony's
Walkman series of media players has done its best to keep stride, stuffing in new features and design refinements over the years, but touchscreen-dominated players are
clearly in vogue, and it looks like the company is finally ready to break down and get touchable. According to the Sony stalkers over at Sony Insider, there will be 16 and 32GB touchscreen Walkman players at CES 2009 this coming January. The literal and figurative centerpiece is to be a 3-inch OLED display (possibly that 3.3-inch panel making the rounds, or something more Sony specific), running a touch interface with many similarities to the current Walkman players. Also slated for inclusion is WiFi, enabling a YouTube app, over the air podcast downloads, built-in access to
Amazon's MP3 store and an unspecified web browser. The shots of the player above are obviously mockups, and the real hardware is supposed to have physical music control buttons -- and hopefully hold to some sort of reality-based conception of scale. All this info is exclusive to the Sony Insider ninjas, so we can't vouch for its veracity, but it's an obvious and welcome move from Sony, so we won't look a gift rumor in the mouth.
posted December 12th 2008 12:36PM
fake, poor illustrator work, they even let the end of "getty images" on the right bottom image...
bye bye iPOD ....nice knowing you since the past 5 years.
Looks like the device that they have in Playstation Home.
This better have at least vga resolution and not the stupid WQVGA one.
This WALKMAN design reminds me of my old Clie TH55.
Man... now I want to get a TH55 again. It's got a MP3 player and touchscreen too.
Any Clie TH55 owners out there? Hurray for Sony for bringing back the design!
Unfortunately, I've been enslaved by iTunes, and so any other MP3 player won't be able to play about half of my music.
iTunes unlocking software!
I think this is great, wifi podcasts, amazon store built in, which will mean buying music over wifi, web browser and youtube, wow, plus oled. Its damn amazing to me
Just a reminder to all the Apple fanboys:
The Cowon D2 was released BEFORE the Ipod Touch was.
New dream job: Drawing mockups for Sony products. Perfect timing, I just got my PhD in drawing rectangles.
Apple is NOT the standard!
1. Apple has a lousy sound quality on iPod/Phone. It is worse than a mini-disk I had from Sony years ago.
2. If Sony can merge this with their XPERIA X1 that would be the killer product for me.
3. Sony: please don't call it iWalk and avoid people that will say you're copying Apple - you're superior in this field.
I like this product!!!
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this reminds me of the device that your avatar uses in Playstation Home. The shape and screen especially. It would be interesting if Sony changed out the device from the generic "Home remote" to this. They already replaced the PSP that was in the very early closed beta. To use another real device would be awesome.
If Sony prices this right, this will compete with Touch. Does anyone have news on a Sony phone with OLED to compete with iPhone?
Is there FLAC support onboard?
finally revealed in MS paint?
totally agreed!
apple do have the best software engineers in this planet!
they even made a free application called crashomatic for every ipods they make!
woot! i just love it when my ipod freezes....
can't wait to see that sony...it's either that or cowon s9 urghh
Can't wait! Sony have always been the best in Audio quality. Don't Mess, I've never migrated to iPod because of the crap sound quality. Use top notch Shure headphones on both a Sony Walkman and an Apple iPod, and you will notice the difference, Sony wins handsdown, iPod is just a marketing hype and just a fashionable product. I still do not like iTunes, I prefer to use an mp3 player as Mass Storage device to manage my music.
Only way I will shift to Apple, if they improve their Audio quality, and to have the ability to manage music as a Mass storage device as well as iTunes.
Well this looks interesting. Sounds like a iPod touch killer to me. It's basically an iPod touch, with killer sound quality and a 3" (maybe 3.3") OLED over the iPod touch's standard 3.5" TFT LCD. To top it off, if sony included bluetooth and a speaker on this at CES, I would even drop $300 on this baby. I hope the body is not plastic, nor the screen. An aluminum enclosure and a glass screen/front would be awesome. I am starting to think this could a successor to the Sony Mylo Com2. I do really hope sony releases this, at a reasonable price.