The Sony Walkman is an iconic brand within the music and gadget world. The Sony Walkman TPS-L2 (cassette player) was the world’s first ‘affordable portable stereo’ and after its release Sony firmly cemented themselves as king of portable music.
Things changed fast when the CD came along but Sony kept up with times with their portable CD player the Discman. It seems irrelevant talking about cassettes and CDs in an article about an Android smartphone, but the point is that the walkman range has a long and illustrious legacy which stretches over three musical formants. When CD became old news and Apple and the iPod ushered us into in the MP3 generation the Walkman was reborn as a mobile phone. The W800 was a stylish hybrid; part MP3 player and part mobilephone, something which seems to be the absolute norm these days. The humble W800 was so popular it branched out into an entire family of walkman phones. Sony claimed that they had sold three million Walkman phones by the time the 6th instalment (W950) was released. But they never did quite have enough to take on Apple and ultimately they fizzled out.
But now the walkman has decided to make a comeback with the help of Sony Xperia.The Xperia range has become a dominate force in the Android running smartphone market. The mix of solid well-built hardware and software which compliments Google’s OS (Timescape, Mediascape etc) has lead to a whole series of award winning phones from the X10 to the new Playstation Phone (Xperia Play.) The range has even began to branch out to Windows.
The new Xperia walkman phone is said to be called the W15 and will be an Android running handset that is rumoured to be based on the miniature Xperia X8 smartphone. Word is that the handset will come complete with a 3-inch 480×320-pixels capacitive screen, a Qualcomm MSM7227 chip clocked and a 3.2-megapixel camera with flash. On the walkman side of the phone, we’ve got a customised interface and a dedicated audio chip that supports lossless codecs.
One of the main selling points of the X8 is its price tag but the W15 though inspired by the X8 will come with improvements, tweaks and fresh features which are bound to bump up the price tag, just hopefully not too much. Currently an X8 goes for around £100-140 so let’s say £150- £180 for W15 (an estimated guess.)
Based on the success of other Xperia phones things look good for the W15. There’s a huge market for value Android handsets. Add value to gimmick (Walkman functionality) to respected brands and you’ve got a winner. Nothing is 100% confirmed yet though, so keep your eyes peeled for further Walkman news.
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