Sony's Answer to iPod...

[melon]

http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/01/technology/sony_apple.reut/index.htm

I'll give you blurbs on the article, but if you want to read the whole thing, click the link above.

It is expected to sell for around ¥53,000, or $487, in Japan and less than $400 in the United States, Sony said, undercutting Apple's 40-gigabyte device, which sells for $499 and can hold up to 10,000 songs.

So $400 for 20 GB, and I can spend $99 more and get a $40 GB iPod? Where the real savings?

Because Sony uses the same 20-gigabyte hard drives across many of its product lines, including computers, it stands to benefit from massive price discounts for buying these devices in volume.

"Prices could fall by as much as 50 percent in the next 12-18 months," Dougherty said.

Well, there's the savings, but in the next 12-18 months, who knows what Apple could create in response. Of course, loyal Apple fanatics don't seem to mind paying too much for an iPod either.

But this is where it will fail:

As with Sony's other players, the NW-HD1 plays songs in the company's proprietary ATRAC format only, meaning it is not compatible with other online stores and cannot play tunes in the popular MP3 format.

Goodbye, Sony. Why did you even waste your money on developing this product? Didn't you learn a damn thing from BetaMAX? I'll give you a hint, if you've forgotten over the past 30 years: proprietary formats fail, when a wider format is readily available. Why do you think that VHS kicked your ass all those years ago? The only reason your proprietary DVCAM format hasn't similarly died is because your only competitor in the large DV formats is the equally proprietary DVCPRO format, and their video editing decks are more than twice the price of yours. So, yeah, you can get away with being proprietary in the professional realm, but I'd have thought you'd have learned your lesson by now in the consumer realm!

Comments?

Melon

 

[SPeedY_B]

The whole "We dont play mp3" thing amuses me to no end, a friend of mine once purchased a sony "mp3" player only to find it did not actually play mp3's. It was returned to the store soon as possible

 

[Grandmaster]

That's why I hate their MD Players too, you need to convert the damn mp3s! And I'm not surprised it was so outrageously priced.

 

[the_music_man]

i usuallly support sony on everything but im givin it a thumbs down on this one . lol

 

[NetRyder]

Heh, never even heard of ATRAC. They could at least have added support for other popular formats if not for mp3.

 

[Petros]

Looks like they think it's still 1994 and the public will love anything they make.

 

[dreamliner77]

ATRAC is just another compression format. It's never really been tested for quality because Sony is the only major company that has liscensed it (there is another small company somewhere that uses it). ATRAC (3, plus, etc) has major drawbacks, mostly that there are only a few different quality settings, and you have to use Sony's SonicStage software to transcode. And we all know that transcoding is bad, bad, bad. Transcoding IST Death.

 

[Tabula Rasa]

Usless, for the same price you can get multi codec players with the same HD size.

 

[~bk]

Meh... iPod is the best.

 

[Grandmaster]

Depends on who you ask Bilal

 

[Tabula Rasa]

Meh... iPod is the best.

My iRiver player suits me well If iPods where a little less expensive I'd say they are the best too.