Sony plans to sell advanced Walkman portable music players later this year. The announcement comes hours after Apple unveiled the pencil-thin
"iPod nano" digital player.
"Our previous models have been well accepted by customers in Japan and the United Kingdom. But we are
not at all satisfied with where we are now," said Koichiro Tsujino, co-President of Connect, a Sony
unit which makes portable music players and offers online music distribution services.
"I understand a certain company made an announcement earlier today. We will accelerate our challenge
with these new models," he told a news conference.
Sony, which created the portable music market 26 years ago with its now-legendary cassette-playing
Walkmans, has lost out to Apple in the portable digital era as it focused on its mainstay CD and Mini
Disc players.
Sony will offer two hard disk-based music players -- one with a storage capacity of 20 gigabytes (GB)
and the other with 6 GB -- and three flash memory-based players (2GB. 1GB, 512MB) that will keep the
existing models' perfume bottle appearance.
The 6 GB model is Sony's first hard-disk player with a small capacity. Apple's iPod nano comes in 2 GB
and 4 GB capacities.
Sony's new models will add the ability to automatically select and play the songs a user listens to
most, and also to pick songs released in a certain year -- a function Sony calls the "time machine
shuffle."
The new models will go on sale in Japan on November 19 and Sony aims to launch them overseas by the
end of the year.
The 20 GB hard-disk model, capable of storing up to 13,000 songs, is expected to retail at around
35,000 yen in Japan, Sony said.
Sony aims to sell a total of 4.5 million hard disk and flash memory portable music players in the year
to next March, up from 850,000 units a year earlier.
Apple has sold about 22 million iPods worldwide since their introduction in October 2001, making it by
far the most widely used player in a market that research firm In-Stat expects to nearly quadruple to
104 million units a year by 2009.