Get a Glimpse on Sony’s Plans for Audio Players in 2009
Let’s talk a bit about Audio division, namely its baby Network Walkman that has been bullied pretty much to near death by Apple’s iPod. I know a lot of audiophiles out there who are die-hard Sony devotees pray and hope that Sony still has something up its sleeve to show the world that Walkman is still alive and has a lot of potential. I’d say that thanks to those fans the Walkman business stayed alive in the US even though it was crippled with DRM and MP3s were a big No-No in the Sony Audio division.
Eliot Van Buskirk from the WIRED blog has shed some light on the upcoming Walkman line up for us. In the picture I can see familiar faces of Rick Clancy and Stan Glasgow discussing their plans for that product for 2009. Check out the article below and let us know if you think Walkman has a chance to live on another year…
“At Sony’s annual executive round table in New York on Thursday morning, Sony Electronics’ president and COO Stan Glasgow told reporters gathered there about the company’s forecast for the holiday (grim but not disastrous), how the imploding electronics retail market is affecting Sony and its product roadmap for 2009 and beyond.
There’s still no sign of the iTunes/Zune-style store that Glasgow (seated at the head of the table in the photo to the right) said the company was looking into at this same meeting in 2006. Sony president of consumer sales Jay Vandenbree told Wired.com after the round table that Sony had no plans to launch such a store in the coming year.
Instead, he said, Sony will add “solid” audio feature to their portable hardware, and that the company’s next-generation portable audio designs would feature “stronger integration” with its other products. Sony will likely add stronger WiFi features to its audio-capable portables (the PSP already has WiFi but not the standalone music portables). This woul enable wireless song syncing and streaming within the home and near hotspots. Those devices could borrow technology from Sony mylo. Plus, Glasgow said Sony is adding WiFi syncing to its line of point-and-shoot cameras, so the same could hold true for its portable audio players.
Another wireless feature could be in the works too. Sony was bullish on Bluetooth at the same meeting in 2007, so it Vandenbree’s “integration” could mean the ability to beam music from portable audio devices into more of the company’s home theater receivers, although neither executive touched on Bluetooth during this year’s roundtable.
Vandenbree also told Wired.com after the meeting that Sony’s portable audio players will be “more versatile” in 2009. This could mean support for more audio and video formats in addition to the wireless features mentioned above. Wild speculation: Sony has close ties to Apple on the video side… could he have meant that Sony players will work with Apple’s DRM? Not likely.
Overall, Vandenbree told us to expect new designs, closer integration with other Sony products and more versatility from the company’s upcoming portable audio line-up. But Sony will not announce a major music store/player strategy at the Consumer Electronics Show in January (a plan probably best left abandoned, judging from their first online music store). We look forward to seeing the specifics in January, but this is the Sony portable audio scoop for now.”
SONY has not mentioned anything at this meeting about an online music store like iTunes or Zune Marketplace because they said that the Playstation Store would take care of that by 2010. Am I right? I’m pretty sure that was what Howard Stringer said a few months ago at a meeting in Tokyo, Japan.
I for one welcome the integration with other sony products, I have wifi and bluetooth in my sony vaio and wouldn’t mind using it with the walkman for transfering songs. As well I would really like to see better integration with bravia tvs. Our Z series ships with an ipod dock but it doesn’t work for any walkman nor can I stream my walkman via my sony sound system using the cradle I bought, so miss miss for tv and av system.
I would not like to see any form of the cross media bar in the new walkmans, it works nicely in the bravia, but not on a walkman, unless it is modified for quicker and easier access to the features.
expanded codec support is a must, audio and video, higher flash capacity and retaining drag and drop.
Hopefully wifi can be turned off to save power. As for release, the sooner, the better, with full capacities in western markets, no picking and choosing what capacities should be sold wherever.
It’s simple. If they are going to add WiFi to their Walkmans, all they have to be capable of is connecting to the Playstation Store, where PS3s and PSPs can connect to download games and video. For the Walkmans however, instead of games and video, all that would be necessary would be music and video. It’s set up already, what more do they need to do??? How frickin hard can it be to add music?? It’s just video-less video, for crying out loud?? And this may come as a shock, but… Sony also owns a music company!! OMFG!!!! How frickin’ convenient!!! You would think it would be so easy to add music, even if it’s just the Sony Music catalogue. I mean, it’s not as if Sony Music is available at iTunes or anywhere else, right? Wait, you mean it is?? Sony Music provides it’s catalogue to every frickin’ e-store except the Sony-owned Playstation store??? WTF???????? Does this make any sense???? Please, can anyone from Sony explain this to me??? OMG, MY HEAD IS GOING TO EXPLODEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Communication, better marketing, of the Walkman features (noise cancellation, Bluetooth stereo, sound quality etc) would be the key thing, imho, together with larger capacities.
theFaze, well said….
“stronger integration with other products”….
is it really that important ? 95% percent of ppl probably wud not use it….(though it is interesting to have)
it is better to put importance to core functionality than things like this….
better if they can have,
multiple language support,
international FM support.
all chinese products support these features for a paltry price of sony……
sharing platform with mylo shd have been done since its inception….in fact i dont see purpose of separate mylo for that matter….mylo with good storage and typical sony sound is all we need…
there should also be a cell phone variant of mylo….
“on wifi and bluetooth”
with my SonyEricsson phones I can transfer content across devices using wireless ……what is stopping sony to implement the same on walkman…..(Legal disclaimer: I dont mean content sharing across users,but across my own walkman devices…..and by content I mean the ones I create out of my own guitar…and other instruments !!!! )
GUI:
walkman GUI is seriously boring, not expected out of a company which wants to position itself as like.no.other brand
Samsung is way better …..
“Wild speculation: Sony has close ties to Apple on the video side… could he have meant that Sony players will work with Apple’s DRM? Not likely.”
Yeah, very unlikely. Since the portable audio devices already have substantial audio format support, I see a few areas where there might be some improvement.
1.) Normalize ATRAC support. JDM portable audio devices still support ATRAC (the lossy versions). However with the shutdown of the Connect music stores, this support was discontinued in other regions (along with SonicStage). However applications like ACID, Vegas, Soundforge, etc. still support ATRAC encoding as does the PS3. The PSP and Mylo even supports OpenMG encrypted ATRAC files stll (Connect/Mora content). Even though users are very unlikely to use that support, it’d be nice to normalize support across all the devices to a specific level to reduce potential incompatibilities.
2.) Normalize DRM support across devices. Yes DRM == the ick. But we’re stuck with it for now. All the current Walkman devices currently support WMRM (replacing OpenMG), however none of Sony’s other devices like the Mylo, PSP, or PS3 support it. While wireless streaming is a possible workaround, it also involves (e.g. Bluetooth A2DP) recompression for transmission and the inevitable quality loss.
3.) Lossless support. ATRAC itself is available in a pretty slick lossless format, but it was never supported on any portable device. Additional formats in that category would be nice (e.g. ALAC, WMA Lossless, and the most significant being FLAC). I know from personal account that many engineers in the various audio subsections are audiofiles and in general aren’t exactly thrilled with the popularity of lossy compression formats. Adding lossless format support across the board would be a good step in this direction.
4.) Additional open formats and containers. Support for formats such as FLAC (as mentioned above), Ogg Theora and Vorbis as well as containers such as Matroska. This is probably unlikely as there’s little to no legal direct content distribution channels for content in these formats (ripping CDs to Vorbis being the only that’s legally protected as fair use, and supporting Vorbis is still legally shakey). On the other hand it would be pretty good community gesture that potentially make Sony devices far more receptable; especially to an enthusiast community.
“OMG, MY HEAD IS GOING TO EXPLODEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
It needs to, seriously…
More capacity,more capacity, more capacity. Come on Sony, do you stock up on so many lower capacity chips that you have to be ALWAYS behind on capacity. And why is it that I have to choose between noise cancelling OR 16Gb, why can’t I have both in one device?
Also Sony please note……..judging by the comments on this website nothing generates more interest than the Sony Walkman range. I believe it still has a future.Apple has to hand over the crown at some stage, the ipod WILL lose it’s appeal. Will Sony be poised to take over though???
Well,right now blue tooth headphones are terrible IMO for the price they are available .
Whatever it is I will love to know what Sony is upto in 2009 .I hope they will come up with something unique .
The only thing stopping me from owning a Sony player permanently right now is the lack of GAPLESS support, if that’s going to be one of their “solid” audio feature” then I would be over the moon with excitement.
I love Sony’s current line up, but n GAPLESS stops me from keeping them longer than the review period.
I have a NWZ-A729, and it’s near perfect, it has fantastic audio quality, it’s the right form factor. The only things Sony MUST do, if they want some of Apples marketshare is to do the following:
1/ Make bigger capacity devices, 16GB is not enough. Exapandable Memorystick support would be a welcome addition.
2/ Gapless suport
3/ FLAC support.
Get them in, and you have the audiophiles choice of player sewn up.
WIth all respect – the masses do not know or care what FLAC is, and barely understand gapless. Millions of iPods were sold without either of these things. If it is even possible to “win” this war, which I’m not at all sure it is, Sony needs to do one thing and do it well – MARKET! They need cool commercials with cool looking people dancing around listening to their devices. They need full-page ads in Wired and other trendy mags. From a hardware and software perspective, they basically have everything they need right now, except perhaps integration with one or more stores (i.e., iTunes, whatever).
Seamless Gapless playback is essential in a quality audio device.
Support for atrac and atrac lossless would be highly desirable also (atrac is a very good format).
Smooth integration in the modern electronic home/car/city is also key.
Should also be intuitive and fun and a sense of freedom, have premium audio and video delivery. Feel great in the hand (cold metal is always better than warm plastic) with a certain ‘weight’. Look stunning. Have bigger capacity, longer battery life and use less power and therefore be ecologically sound (be recyclable also).
Plenty to get on with then
(have always bought sony audio products and would like to continue to do so as they have never let me down, have had fantastic sound quality, the main reason for an audio device, and all still work)