p2pnet.net News:- Once, everyone had, or wanted, a Sony Walkman.

Then came CDs and everyone had, or wanted, a portable CD player. But it didn’t have to be a Sony.

Mp3 changed that and although there are loads of excellent, and affordable, mp3 players out there, Apple’s brilliant marketing made iPod a household name and iTunes – with virtually the same music ‘product’ at the same prices as a bunch of other sites which didn’t come up with iPod – was thrust upon us.

Now, however, Sony hopes to turn back time with its first HD-based music slash video player, and the fact it, too, has a download site – although at this point, the ‘music store’ is apparently nothing to get excited about. And that means for the time being, at least, Sony is no more than another manufacturer with a cool player.

Anyway, Sony’s Vaio Pocket VGF-AP1 has a 20 gig hard disk drive and a 2.2-inch color LCD screen with 320 X 256 pixel resolution (the main interface) that also shows track info when songs are playing.

BUT – it also plays album art/videos, if there are any, which is one of its main stand-out features.

The other is: unlike iPod, it also has a long battery life.

“Vaio Pocket easily beats the iPod, offering around 20 hours of playback compared to the iPod’s 8 hours,” says MacWorld here, going on:.

“The Vaio Pocket will go on sale in Japan on June 5 for around ¥53,000 (US$472). There are no plans to sell it outside Japan at this point.”

Vaio works with Sony’s ATRAC3 (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding for MiniDisc 3) and ATRAC3 plus digital music formats, both of which are lumbered with copy protection – DRM.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2004 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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