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A small and compact MP3 player that might lack frills but offers great battery life and sound quality.
Sony's latest Walkman is an impressive personal audio and video player
Ever since the iPod arrived in 2001, the Walkman story has been a strange, rather downbeat affair. Sony's players have been dogged by uninspiring designs, iffy interfaces and a perverse insistence on proprietary formats like ATRAC, as well as DRM. All that has changed in the last couple of years, but is the Walkman brand now strong enough to finally turn things around? On this evidence, no. And here's why
Saying that Sony dropped the ball doesn't begin to describe quite how catastrophic the past five years have been for the company's forays into the post-Minidisc, portable music player market
Pitched directly at the iPod Nano market, Sony's latest Walkman has a few advantages over its rival. The screen is bright and crisp and the displayed MP4 videos look great. The battery life, too, is impressive should it manage the purported 30 hours continuous audio playback it promises.
At last, a sign that Sony is recovering from the insanity that has gripped it over the last few years. This flash-based Walkman has, counter to recent tradition, both a pleasantly usable interface and decent desktop software.
Sony's XDR-S20 costs twice as much as the cheapest model in our DAB radio group test, Pure's One, but Sony hasn't done the math; we expect more than we get for our £100.
Sony's approach to digital music has at times seemed rather like Bambi on ice; products look good, but are haphazard at best. Its major problem was a halfway house of design: half-desirable, half-unusable.
Common perception has it that Sony has lost its way. Despite the company recently employing a Brit as its MD, such new measures don't have a retrospective effect. In any case, he's got his work cut out