Are apples banned at Sony's headquarters?
Wow...! Never heard about this Sony and Eve story? Struggling to kill the gadget that is, so far, leading the crowd?
Yet, Sony has, as it seems, decided to make our lives simple (most criticisms so far were about an alleged poor ease-of-use) with this new hard-disk MP3 series that comes only two weeks after the new pop-up USB plug "Bean".
The newborns are the 20GB NW-A3000 and 6GB NW-A1000 and both look gorgeous, thanks to a futuristic translucent material. The "big" 20GB comes in violet and silver, the 6GB in violet, silver, pink and blue.
NW-A1000 comes in 4 colours
The curvy look and feel, as well as the buttons remind of mobile phones -well THESE, at least, Apple does NOT produce- and Sony claims it had this in mind when they conceived this new series. A good move, since almost everyone on this planet has learned how to use them, so no bad surprise.
Sony claims -AGAIN, to silence critics- that "the search method is much simpler to use than other players as it’s easy to jump straight to the artist album or song via their initials, rather than scrolling up and down a long list." Talking about ease-of-use and no-bugs-please, they embark a new "Connect" soft that replaces the much unacclaimed SonicStage.
At that point come several keywords: "Shuffle", "Initial Search" and "Artist Link". -Shuffle is everywhere, be it a "Time Shuffle", a "Favourite shuffle", or even an "Intelligent Shuffle"... you can't escape Sony's Shuffle... Good point again, since these functionalities allow the user for more rapid, intuitive searches: -Intelligent Shuffle allows for music to be searched by album, artist, genre, rating, release date, song, and recently transferred -Time Shuffle allows you to select years randomly-Favourite Shuffle is a selection of the 100 most selected songs
Then comes the "revolutionary" ARTIST LINK function. This means that if you’re listening to an artist or track and you press the artist link button the new WALKMAN will search, find and display similar artists in that genre.
Babies come with design-matching accessories
Stylish remote control for easier navigation, carrying cases, a docking station for the PC, and a docking speaker system giving the option to connect to a PC (data sync) and play music through the speakers
Well born, maybe with a silver spoon, but are these the iPod killers?
Visit Sony Website to get an opinion here