It's bizarre to only have 32GB/64GB storage. I remember getting a dedicated music player with 80GB in 2008. Bulk storage seems like it would be one of the few good ways to differentiate these from a smartphone
Who IS the target market for something like this? It's almost as big as a phone, and costs as much as many phones... why would anyone use this instead of their phone? I guess maybe if you have a giant phablet and want something more portable (or more disposable, but it's still $400) for workouts or that kind of thing? Maybe if you're addicted to social media and so the fact that it can't do anything besides play music is a feature?
I don't have this exact model, but I did have two earlier iterations of the Walkman which I liked for three reasons:
1) it's a lot lighter than a phone, so convenient to take running
2) the battery lasts days (if not weeks) rather than a single day
3) it has a wired headphone jack, so I don't have to use Bluetooth earbuds that regularly fall out or disconnect.
I don't recall either model being that expensive though.
Good points. The battery thing seems like a big one for someone who travels a lot especially. Headphone jack is nice, but I find a USB adapter works fine when I want to use wired headphones with my phone. Size/weight probably depends on the size of your phone. I tend to prefer smaller phones, so to me most of what people use today is a giant "phablet".
That thing is running android. The battery usage on android phone is based on network access. If you install as many apps as you do on this walkman than on a regular mobile phone, it won't last better. Also if like me you don't install any social media app or anything that connect on a regular basis to some service and play music stored locally on your sdcard your smartphone will also last for days.
I can understand wanting to use an affordable tiny ipad nano like device instead of a smartphone. But I don't understand this, being 3 times more expensive than a decent entry level smartphone unless you want to use it with high quality over the ears noise cancelling headphones. The physical buttons do not even seem to be ergonomically placed.
> Who IS the target market for something like this?
Some people work in environments where you can't have "smart" devices. I could see this squeaking by (for example you can have some single purpose devices like Garmin watches, but not Apple watches with wifi and cellular).
It might be good for airplanes too if you want something to drive your headphones without draining your battery, but I guess in-seat power has kinda solved that already.
> Who IS the target market for something like this? It's almost as big as a phone, and costs as much as many phones...
Me, but I aint paying $800 for it (if I understood the article correctly).
Give me a walkman made specifically for listening to music with 250GB+ and without all the pain to move music onto and off of the device and can last _weeks_ on a single charge with regular use and I would purchase the shit out of it.
I feel like a lot of people don't realize just how leashed they are with modern phones. My favorite phone ever is an old Palm phone that I still have to this day because I refuse to throw it away. It's smaller than the original SE, far lighter, and could last up to two weeks on a single charge. Contrast that with the 3rd gen SE I have now and I'd give it up in a heartbeat if something like that Palm arrived.
But it won't, so moving the music playing experience off of the phone is a good step to loosening that leash.
> Anyway, back to this $800 model. Unlike regular phone equipment, this has a proper audio amplifier with big, beefy capacitors to power the analog audio output. That makes it much bigger than the A300, at 72.6×132 mm and a whopping 17 mm thick. It also has two audio outs: a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack and a 4.4 mm "balanced" audio jack, which is used by some high-end audio equipment.
It just feels weird to cheap out on storage, of all things, on an $800 device in 2023
Yeah, I get the audiophile one. (I mean, I don't get it really, but I get that there are people who do.) But the cheaper (but still expensive) one didn't seem to offer much. As many people mentioned though, battery life is a compelling one.
I finally made the switch to a phone without headphone jack last year. I like the phone, but the pretty expensive bluetooth headphones I tried don't sound as great as my beaten year old wired ones.
There's many places where I don't care about having a dangling wire: at home watching tv/movies, while working at my desk, or in public libraries for instance.
A small audio player that work with my wired headphones would be workable, I l'm seriously thinking about it if moving music in and out is easy enough.
The target market is people who want a device with a headphone jack, an SD card slot and a good DAC. The number of phones that include these features nowadays is small.
My criteria is heavy on "do one thing well". I want something without internet, "apps", a convoluted OS, and basically all the other things that make phones a Swiss army knife.
Those things aren't free, they come with a cost which I'm not willing to pay; attention, bugs, distraction-as-a-service. Also, I'm not 100% on this because I haven't tested it, but I think the output I get from FLAC files on my music device is better than my phone.
Yes, I'm also the type who enjoys a separate camera.
There's a piece of mind to dedicated devices I was robbed of for a while with the the phone.
Now having said all this, the real answer to your question is; nobody, because this device seems to be a phone :/
> the real answer to your question is; nobody, because this device seems to be a phone
Well said, that's _exactly_ how I feel. I would 100% purchase a dedicated music device, but it can't be a glorified phone (I don't even like the smartscreen in the article) with a phones problems.
> real answer to your question is; nobody, because this device seems to be a phone :/
The terrible error here is including the Android home screen in the marketing materials.
By all means base it on Android, but I never want to see anything like that on a "stand alone" device. Eliminating any generic UI should have been a priority from the go because it completely changes the sentiment around the device.
I think that's not the point. They are making a product seemingly targeted at audiophiles and they don't provide enough storage (for the amount of music an audiophile might have), while showing off some obscure features like the gold plated components
It doesn't "provide enough storage" because it's not supposed to provide storage. You're supposed to provide your own storage, whatever amount you see fit, and you are able to upgrade it at any time.
I know people nowadays are used to not having any control over their storage and simply throwing their device in the trash and buying a new one every few years when it's no longer enough, but it wasn't like this in the past.
In this case storage should be mainly used for music. I don't think an SSD is going to make a big difference, assuming Sony's software supports playing from SD cards.
Sure, loading a large FLAC library onto a microSD will initially take longer, but the thing only needs to be done once, and many audio enthusiastsnwill already have microSD cards with it on.
Maybe I'm just not the target market. They must be doing something right because Hideo Kojima uses one (and frequently tweets pictures of it): https://twitter.com/hideo_kojima_en/status/16147460932707409...