Sony introduces Walkman Video

Finally, eighteen months after rival Apple demonstrated the music player featuring video iPod video on the market, Sony will unveil the first video Walkman. Recall, 15 years ago Sony's Walkman player made a lot of noise on the market. Meanwhile, the Walkman almost monopolized the global market for personal music players.

The first NW-A800 Walkman series, A806 and A808 will be sold in Europe next April. All models have only one difference, the capacity of flash memory, respectively 2GB, 4GB and 8GB. The 8GB memory model, can store 8 hours of video and 3,000 songs.

Sony's Walkman video is sold online in Europe for between 180 euros and 300 euros, depending on configuration

Sony said: The machines are all equipped with a 2 'LCD screen, the resolution is 240 x 320 pixels. This on-screen image has some advantages over iPod like portrait images, landscape images that can be viewed both horizontally and vertically, depending on the original format and user requirements. .

If the battery is fully charged, the music playback time is also very different depending on the format of the file. If the music file is in 132k bps format (bit / second), it can be heard for 30 hours continuously. Video file MPEG4 768k bps format, the use time will be 7 hours.

However, Sony noted that customers, video files in small format, but occupy less memory space, but when stored on Walkman, must work "harder" to encrypt a small file format 384k bps. At that time, battery life was only 6 hours and 30 minutes.

Video Walkman is 44mm wide, 88mm long, 9mm thick and weighs 53 grams. The lowest NW-A805 Walkman model is sold online by Sony for 180 EURO, followed by 230 EURO and 300 EURO depending on memory capacity. Meanwhile, the iPod 30 GB of Apple sold in Europe only costs 289 EURO.

The only comparison of the two product prices is not objective because Apple's iPod has a larger screen but is bulky and heavier than Sony's new Walkman.

Sony also noted that the new product is in fact not the first product that Sony supports for video. August 1998 Sony commercialized GV-8 video Walkman. At that time, the GV-8 ran 8mm video tapes and was priced at $ 820.

Nguyen Vu