Sony Bows Video Walkman, Kills "Connect"

I'm constantly amazed at how Sony—the company that dominated the portable music market in the 1980s with the Walkman—is still playing catch-up with its digital music players. Yet here it is, belatedly launching its first U.S. Walkman capable of playing video. Meanwhile, its Sony Connect music store, which never caught on with consumers, is going the way of the dodo.

It's hard to remember now, but back in the day, the Walkman was the coolest game in town when it came to portable music—as a kid in the 80s, I was desperate for one of my own (I settled for a knock-off). But as the digital music era dawned and MP3s began to take off, Sony made a critical strategic blunder: it created a proprietary music format known as ATRAC, and until recently, Sony's portable music devices played ATRAC files only. Of course, the rest of us loved our MP3s, so we snapped up MP3 players by the likes of Rio, Creative, and of course, Apple. By the time Sony realized its mistake and began supporting MP3s, it was too late—the company's once-dominant Walkman brand was left in the iPod's dust.

Anyway, I digress. Sony's new video Walkmen (hasn't the video iPod been out for almost two years now?) come in two flavors: the NWZ-A810 series (pictured), which sports a two-inch QVGA screen, and the "youth-oriented" NWZ-S610 series with a 1.8-inch screen and an FM radio (strangely absent in the pricier NWZ-A810 edition). Both the players have dumped Sony's ATRAC format entirely in favor of MP3/AAC/WMA support (including DRM-protected WMA files), and they'll also work with AVC and MPEG4 video files. Transferring music and videos to the new Walkmen is a simple matter of firing up Windows Media Player.

Meanwhile, along with Sony's announcement of the new Walkmen, the company finally admitted what was obvious to industry watchers for months now: the coming demise ("not before March 2008") of Sony Connect, a music store that was supposed to rival Apple's iTunes Store. (It's ironic that Nokia announced its own music store only yesterday.) Sony Connect tunes are sold in the ATRAC format—which, of course, won't work on the new video Walkman models. (You can always burn Sony Connect tunes to an audio CD and then rip them back into MP3s.) If you're a fan of the Sony Connect e-book service and reader, don't worry—they will live on, the company said.

Back to the new video Walkman players: they'll be available in September, and the NWZ-A810 Walkman will retail for $230 for the 8GB version, $180 for 4GB, and $140 for 2GB. The NWZ-S610 will sell for $210 for 8GB of storage, $160 for 4GB, and finally $120 for the 2GB variation.

Related:
Press release [Sony]