Sony is moving on. It long ago conceded defeat in an unpopular war against Apple’s iPod, a war Sony lost because it adhered to a silly proprietary format (ATRAC), listened too hard to the needs of its music and movie stablemates instead of its customers, and served up lukewarm chow when it should have been changing the world. This much we know.

We got the impression at Sony’s invite-only trade show last week that the company was keen to put the past behind it. UK reps joked how some of its products are now compatible with others made ‘by a certain fruit-flavoured company’ and instead started talking about ‘sharing your music’.

Share your music

Not sharing your music between people particularly (no, that would be wrong, obviously) but sharing your music with other devices. Which is why the big deal with this year’s Walkman is that it includes Bluetooth A2DP, enabling you punt music wirelessly to any compatible device from headphones to hi-fi units. Unsurprisingly Sony is selling those too. We’ll come back to this in a minute.

The 2008 NW-A829 Walkman we have in our hands is an evolutionary step up from last year’s NW-A800. It pretty much boasts the same user interface, same wide compatibility with different music formats (from protected WMA to unprotected AAC) and plays back MPEG-4/H.264 video just like an iPod does. So far, so ho-hum.

What marks out the NW-A829 from its predecessor then is Bluetooth, of course, plus 16GB of storage, a QVGA screen and a £225 price tag that’s within shouting distance of Apple’s bigger - but arguably more feature-rich - iPod touch.

Using the Walkman

It’s no accident either that the NW-A829 also shares stylistic queues with Sony Ericsson mobile phones - a familiar combination of gloss black metal, plastic, glass and silver piping that echoes the Sony Ericsson K series, for example.

The user interface will certainly be familiar to Sony Ericsson users. The main screen features nine application icons arranged in a 3 x 3 grid, each of which can be selected by the square D-pad at the bottom of the player, which also has the play/pause button at its centre.