This past week Sony unveiled a Walkman
digital music player to commemorate the Walkman
brand name's 25th anniversary. The Walkman certainly was a
groundbreaking device when it came out in 1979, because of its ability
to let you listen to your cassettes in stereo without annoying anyone
else around you.
Yes, there were earphones and shirt pocket radios, but they
weren't generally stereo - and they didn't play cassette tapes. The
Walkman was really a big step forward when it first came out.
The same could be said for the iPod. Yes, there were other
digital music players on the market, but few held more than one or
two CDs worth of songs, and none were as stylish as the iPod. The
iPod essentially moved the portable music player market from the
analog Discman to the digital player. Considering that the iPod
currently has greater than a 50% market share, Apple must have done
something right - just as Sony did with the Walkman in 1979.
I've still got an old Walkman that I use occasionally - in fact,
I have two, a WM-1 and a slightly newer WM-22. While they don't
work as well as they once did (for example, the forward and rewind
buttons don't work very well anymore), it's easy to see why the
Walkman sold well from the beginning: It's easy to use. The
controls are right there, and you don't need to read the
instruction manual to figure out how to use them. There are no
unnecessary features, either. You're probably not going to be
recording anything, so why have that feature? (Although Sony did
put out one Walkman model with that feature.)
The most important feature was that they worked with the
standard format of the time, the cassette tape.
Does this sound a bit familiar? That's right, because Apple's
iPod is the modern-day Walkman.
The iPod moved the industry forward in the same way the Walkman
did. While not the first digital music player, it moved the
portable music industry over from CDs to compressed digital music.
It had what people wanted. It sounded good, held a lot of music,
and - most importantly - worked with the existing music format, the
MP3. This allowed people to transfer their MP3s right onto their
iPod without re-ripping their CDs or converting their files.
The new Sony digital Walkman
doesn't support current standards, just Sony's proprietary ATRAC3
format. You have to buy all of your music from Sony's download site
or use their SonicStage
software (Windows only, of course) to convert MP3, WAV, or WMA
files from your CDs or hard drive.
Then there's the claim that Sony's 20 GB Walkman holds more
songs than the high-end 40 GB iPod. Well, it does, but the problem
is sound quality. The iPod holds 10,000 CD-quality songs (128-bit
AAC encoding). CD quality, something Sony's engineers don't seem to
see as a concern (the digital Walkman uses 48-bit encoding). After
all, music is music, right? The more music it holds the better,
right?
Sorry, but if the music doesn't sound good enough, who wants to
buy the device that plays it?
The iPod sold and continues to sell because it provides the
right combination of style, storage, ease of use, price, and sound
quality. It remains to be seen how well Sony's digital Walkman will
do, but I suspect they will have a hard time with sales. It's
simply not a flexible enough device.
My advice? If you want a good digital music player, look at an
iPod or other similar device. And if you really want a Walkman, hop
on eBay and look for a WM-22. It doesn't play MP3 files,
but it does come in cool colors - like lavender --and it's a lot
more flexible than the Digital Walkman.
