News Sony Takes Aim at Apple But iPod Seen Safe for Now

The Big S finally wakes up and smells the HDD based MP3 player coffee. Could this actually be an iPod slayer that lives up to the name? This from Reuters:

TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp has created a buzz with the unveiling of a new digital music player, but analysts say it has a long way to go before it challenges the industry dominance of Apple Computer's popular iPod.

Sony unveiled the new portable music player on Monday along with a slew of new VAIO-brand computers.

Dubbed "Vaio pocket," it features a hard-disk drive capable of storing 13,000 songs and can store digital camera images too.

The "VAIO pocket" will be the first portable music player with an embedded hard-disk drive to be sold under the Sony brand name when it hits stores in Japan next month.

Full report here

The UI will have to be pretty **** hot to beat the iPod. It's the common faliure of all the pretenders to the throne - they're all capable on the hardware front, but the interface sucks.

 

Am I the only one who didn't buy an iPod purely because so many sheep with no clue of their own went out and bought one?

Sony make the best walkmans in the world, full stop, no arguments.

Best battery life
Best sound quality
Best look and feel
Best (comercial price) headphones
Twenty years experiance
Invented the whole bloody idea

Now I have high hope for this thing, I always had a sony tape walkman, then moved up through 3 of their top level Minidisc players. I had to move to creative to get a 20GB MP3 player but I always lamented doing so, now Sony have got their finger out I can get one of these and get back to that sublime portable audio quality they have always had

 

Sony = ****e


Edit: actually make that overpriced ****e.

 

I love my ipod your right about the UI as thats one of the ipods strongest features, having such an easy way to find the song you want when you want and when you use eupod and get rid of the sound restrictions the ipod sound is as good as any Sony audio device

And who cares if Sony invented the hole portable audio thing if they didn't someone else would have and i bet sony will have a load of restrictions on what file types you can use liek their Atrac format (I think thats what it is calledd!!) which annoyed me with there mem stick units as you had to convert all the music you wanted to that format but heres hoping all competition is good in my book

 

You are not alone! I still have my 6GB Creative Jukebox with blue, modded backlighting on the LCD. I know that the IPOD is a pretty good player, yet it is very overpriced. Take a look at the Creative Jukebox ZEN Xtra. Gives you 60GB for a lower price in an lovely aluminum design.

 

Have to disagree with you there. Sony make good ****. They wouldn't be such a big and sucessful corperation if they were that bad.

 

Good or bad, sony stuff is definately overpriced. Wouldn't surprise me if the first generation sony "iPods" will actually cost more than the apple ones.

 

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  Hm - get itunes and borrow an iPod for a week. (Not that any ipod owner would be able to live without their ipod for that long, but...) you will never ever go back. I was no sheep, I bought the 5gb when it first came out, and then replaced it with a 30gb.
  
  Look and feel? We'll see. Just remember - when you are making consumer electronics, look and feel (UI) is everything. Apple won't be beat.

 

My biggest problem with hard disk walkmans was the battery life - iPod under the best conditions Apple state 8/9hours.

Ok, so I can nearly fit all my music onto 40Gigs, but with Hi-MD you could get 1GB (so about 18hours of music ish) and the battery lasts around 100 hours.

I know people love the look of the iPod, but this MD is about 1/5th the width and almost half as heigh - wieghs an insignificant amount to the iPod also. Check the pictures...

ummmm.... Mag alloy​

But I really figure that both are small enough to fit into your pocket, so don't really care...

It comes down to a choice of having battery life or having all your music with you. If Sony has solved the battery life problem and brings out 60GB models, then you won't even have to make that decision anymore.

 

My mom bought an ipod and I absoluely hate the darn thing and the crap itnues it came with. Itunes has to be the single most crappy piece of software I have used. Upon first installing iteverything worked fine and all was grand. next tiem i loaded it up in place of my cd rom it had my floppy disk drive, wtf. There is also no option to add drives or folders (there is a folder option, but it never keeps the setting) I am using a fairly popular samsung cd-rw. A popular model from a big company. I call apple about this and say that itunes only supports certain drives. wtf. how can it only support certain cd drives, i thought that was a pretty damn standard piece of hardware.

 

It costs $465 which is just a little cheaper than a 40Gb Ipod.

What gets me the thing doesn’t come under the "Media Centre" fiasco that Sony and other manufactures are scrambling to do. Well I suppose it might with its firewir*cough* sorry iLink port.

And are we not all forgetting that Sony PC software is the worst software known to man, well atleast it was when I tried a netMD.

 

I'm all for MD as well. (wish mine hadn't been STOLEN... too bad for them I still have the charger and a replacement battery is $60... suckers)
I'll be interested in seeing some reviews...

 

i have to say, i have a sony MD player to, and man, its awesome, batterylife is forever... and even though i can only get 50-60 songs on it, i can just switch it out w/ farely inexpensive disks.. . but that damn program is the biggest pain ever... almost 1/3 of my songs wont be converted over... for no reason whatsoever. sorry for the threadjack but does anyone know of a program that supports MD but works better?
i might by an ipod just cuz of this stupid program...

 

I must admit - the sony software is sooooo bad.

I found the best way to transfer tracks is to use realplayer (ok, so people don't like the 'ad-ware' nature of the free version) - but you can use drag and drop from window explorer onto the minidisc. Also, there's a check box so you don't have to save ATRAC copies on your hard disk (saving much space) and there's no limit on the amount of time you can upload/"download" tracks from the disk.

The realplayer plugin is a god send, if you haven't tried it because you don't like realplayer - just give it a go.