The Sony Walkman is back and ready to shake up Neil Young’s entry into the audio device with its Hi-Res Audio sound.
The new Walkman is a digital music device supporting the highest of quality formats including FLAC and AIFF as well as the poor quality mp3 and iTunes m4a format.
The Walkman will also play mp4, wmv and m4v video files.
The arrival of the 21st Century Walkman comes right at the time Neil Young has released his high quality playback device the Pono onto the market.
Both the Sony Walkman and Pono have 128GB storage, which at its highest quality level is good for only around five or six albums.
The Pono has extremely poor battery life (about 3 hours), while the Walkman (and an iPod) will give you up to 25 hours of playback time.
Pono has a microSD and USB so an external hard drive can be plugged in for addition music. The Walkman does not appear to have to component.
Both Pono and Walkman offer high quality playback while the iPod/iPhone using iTunes is a fast-food, low quality, high quantity storage device.
Since Apple (in the wisdom) decided to take the 160GB iPod classic off the market, the largest storage device is now the 64GB iPod Touch retailing for A$349. The iPod operates on Apple IOS 8 and includes Siri, iMessage, iTunes Radio, Apps and Games and email and internet access. It is effectively an iPhone without a phone.
For a larger playback device, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus is available with 128GB storage. However, the Apple devices cannot playback high quality FLAC format available on both the Pono and Walkman.
The 128GB Pono (only available from the USA) retails for US$399.
The 128GB Sony Walkman, now available in Australia, comes at a pricey A$699.
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