IFA coverage: Sony Walkman, a new range from an old name

After reading the word “Walkman”, you’ve very likely just thought back to that trusty old cassette player from the 1980s. The one where the play key was constantly jammed. Your second reaction was probably to smile nostalgically to yourself as you slid your finger around the uber-modern touch wheel of your iPod to turn up Kid Rock. Well bear with me on this, because there may just be reason to get excited about the Walkman brand once again, especially with the new top of the range S-series model.

I was fortunate enough to have a chat with Paul Gyles, European Product Manager for Walkman at this year’s IFA trade show. He very patiently explained the new B, E and S series to me as I tried to wrap my head around the idea that these products are going head-to-head with Apple’s iPod, which rather humourously pits the giant Sony as the underdog in this market.

The S730F Walkman is the pride and joy of the new family, and for good reason. Firstly it features Sony’s new SensMe technology for the first time on any of their MP3 players. This nifty idea is basically an automated playlist designed to match your mood. It provides you with pre-set channels such as, Morning, Chill Out and Upbeat and fits your songs into these categories to save you the hassle of trying to think of what you want to listen to the next time you’re feeling “contemplative”. SensMe works through twelve tone analysis technology which then categorises your music into channels based on each song’s speed, mood and rhythm.

The next exciting element to this top of the range Walkman is its sound quality. There is a built-in noise canceling feature which means that the next time you’re listening to your music on a train, you can ensure that your nodding your head to the beat and not to the “clickety-click” of the train tracks.

This noise canceling is complemented by the excellent, high-end EX headphones that comes as standard with this model. The headphones alone retails around the £50 mark and is really a bargain to receive with this Walkman. Especially as, according to Paul, there will be only a £20-£30 price difference between this series and the E series below, which come with standard headphones and only has basic MP3 and video capabilities.

The usability issues of non-iPod MP3 players has been addressed as well in this new range. Simply plug in your new Walkman and instead of having to rely on the dreaded Windows Media Player, a new box will appear on your screen which you can simply use to drag and drop your music into. It will even work with music and playlists from your iTunes library which is innovation indeed! The only downside is that it won’t work with DRM songs that you’ve purchased form iTunes, which to be honest does disregard about a quarter of my music.

The new Walkman series also features open formatting which will be a definite winner in everyone’s eyes. It will support wide range of major video/audio codecs, meaning that there will be no need to re-rip your CD collection over and over again just to update your new MP3 player. This automatically ranks Sony’s usability far ahead of Apple’s incessant reliance on iTunes for everything.

Appearance-wise, the S series has jumped onto the dietary bandwagon and is the thinnest Walkman ever, coming in at just 7.5mm thick. The 2 inch LCD screen has the excellent picture quality that you come to expect of Sony, and in a showcase effort, your new Walkman will come pre-loaded with 8 Sony BMG music videos, so there’s no need for dodgy downloading just to see what the quality is like. You can even customise the interface with a choice of backgrounds or you can even set your own photo as your background.

In a panel interview, Tim Page and Eric Kingdon admitted that the iPod-saturated market is always going to be a difficult one for Sony to crack. With these advancements in technology though, they explained that Sony is trying for a different tactic to Apple’s heavily styled and marketed product. It therefore appears to be a battle between substance or style, but I do get the feeling that Sony has a sense of resignation about them, especially on their marketing front.

The new Walkman range is not nearly as catchily named or marketed as Apple’s iPod series. You simply can’t compare “NWZ-S738F” and “NWZ-E438F” to the James Bond stealth of the word “Nano” or the light-footed tendencies of “Shuffle”. Sony has the futuristic technology but does not seem to have come to terms with the fact that model numbers should only be used in reference to cars from the 1970s, and not the latest MP3 player.

The new Sony Walkman range is both stylish and usable which does put it one-up on the Apple iPod series. The question is, can Sony reach out to the young market that they so very much want on their side? Let’s wait and see if the first sales figures brings music to their ears.