Sony cuts the ties that bind Walkman
Sony unveiled two new Walkman music players yesterday, 30 August - the NWZ-A810 and NWZ-S610. The two new players bring video storage and playblack capabilities to the iconic Walkman brand, and are the first in the digital players from the company not tied down to Sony's ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) audio format, writes Walaika Haskins of TechNewsWorld.
The demise of the ATRAC audio format will be a benefit for users eager to load their Walkman players with tunes from a wider variety of venues selling music downloads.
However, the switch may be too little far too late for Sony, James McQuivey, a Forrester Research analyst, has told TechNewsWorld, and represents a huge missed opportunity for the company to take the lead in the video playback device market or at least mount a viable challenge against Apple's iPod.
Read the full article here.
