On Thursday, Sony has announced the plan to launch a new version of Walkman (NW-HD1) in a rivalry against Apple"s iPod.
NW-HD1, through Sony"s advanced compression technology, will be able to cater more songs at the same physical hard disk size as the iPod"s 20GB model. Furthermore, it is expected that Sony will be attracting the market by offering this device at less $400 in the United States.
Apart from being cheaper, NW-HD1 will also be featuring the Shock-Resistant technology, a credit-card size dimension, and a battery that lasts for 30 hours.
Sony President, Kunitake Ando, is hoping to set the history of portable music devices with Walkman, once again.
"I don"t know if we can take this market back in a year ... But this launch is our message that we will work hard to put an end to the dominance by just one company," Ando said.
It seems that lately everybody has been taking an aim at the iPod and despite all that, none of them had seem to come close in claiming the crown, yet. While Apple works on iPod v4, will Sony be able to claim a firm stand-point in the market? It all comes down to how usable this device will be. Apart from all that, if there is anything that will prevent this device from being successful, it will probably be the fact that users are limited to Sony"s ATRAC format only.