Sony’s Walkman B100 Kills Off SonicStage And Is Cute Too July 25, 2007
Read more Digital Audio , Gadgets , MP3 , Music , Portable Media
Sony wants to kick some Shuffle butt this week with the launch of a mini MP3 player called the Network Walkman NWD-B100.
The best bit, hands-down, is not size or price, but the fact that this kills-off Sony’s music management software pig, SonicStage. The BW100 is ‘drag and drop’ friendly for ATRAC-free MP3 and WMA files.
This little beauty weighs in at 30g and is tiny but sports a lovely 3-line colour LCD display. The downside is just 12 hours of battery life, which is average rather than great for something this small. The USB connector means you can plug it straight into your laptop or hi-fi, while there’s also a built-in FM tuner, voice recorder and equalizer.
It comes in black, white and violet 1GB and 2GB flavours, which will cost £45 and £55 next month when it launches.-Martin Lynch
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
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Comments
ATRAC's best feature has always been that the processing required for turning the files back into music is far less than for an MP3. ATRAC was designed to run on battery powered devices (MiniDisc) after all, whereas MP3 wasn't. The immediate effect of scrapping ATRAC and supporting MP3 directly is that the battery life plummets, which you note. You can't have your cake and eat it!
There was nothing wrong with ATRAC, just the god awful sonicstage software they thrust upon us with NetMD's and kept going on there MP3 players. I think the death of sonicstage is great news and will be having a drink to celebrate its departure! :)
The only question is, how did Sonic Stage last so long? It is by far the worst piece of software I have ever used. It mystifies me that a company like Sony could not have produced somehting better.
SonicStage was bad, but the truly hideous connect player that came bundled with the NW-A3000 was much much worse