iPod's still the Apple of my ear, even with a Walkman in hand
August 15, 2004
The teenage nephew with the spiky, Billy Idol-ish hair arrived from Italy last month, his first visit to the United States of America, and I figured he'd be hot to meet some girls, go to a sandy beach (he's used to the rocky Adriatic) and probably visit some of New York City's notorious electronics shops.
"Wanna meet some girls?" I asked him a couple of days into his holiday.
"No," he said.
"Wanna go to the beach?"
"No."
"Want anything?"
He thought for four or five seconds.
"An iPod," he said.
The word "Sony" never crossed his lips.
This month, Sony's belated response to Apple's mini-miraculous portable audio player arrives in stores, priced at a premium of one-third over the comparable Apple iPod. We went to Sony Style on Madison Avenue, where the device called NW-HD1 had already landed, the sales tag at $399.
"How's it compare to the iPod?" I asked a salesman.
"Battery life is a lot longer, up to 30 hours," he said.
"The LCD readout is kind of dim," I said.
"Battery life is a lot longer," he said.
"I understand it can't play MP3 files," I said.
"Battery life is a lot longer," he said.
Sense a theme here?
Sony has named its svelte, brushed-silver slice of high technology the Network Walkman - the marketable Walkman name, and the tape player itself, is now 25 years old - as the company grabs at any advantage it can to beat back Apple in this potentially huge market category.
For more than two years the Japanese giant had insisted that its MiniDisc format, which uses slim digital discs that can now hold up to 45 hours of music, was its answer to the iPod. MiniDisc has a committed legion of advocates, and it will continue in Sony's U.S. line. But it became clear along the way that it was not real competition for Apple.
So we have the freshly minted NW-HD1, and in the offing a second hard-disc-based player, the Vaio Pocket, branded under Sony's computer marque, that will be about $500. In response, Apple is shipping its fourth-generation iPod and has cut the price of its 20-gigabyte model - the same capacity as the Network Walkman - to $299.
The Sony player is amazingly compact and strikingly light, and it offers a sonic clarity that's comparable to iPod when the songs are recorded at a decent kilobit rate (Sony claims 13,000 songs can be stored on the NW-HD1, and they can - and they are so compressed that they sound lousy). The battery-life round defaults readily to Sony - 30 hours is probably overstatement, but the HD-1 trounces the new iPod's 12-hour range.
Before we get to the software agita, a couple of hardware issues: The readout screen on the HD1 lacks contrast, and the readouts are small. There is something akin to Apple's navigation wheel on the front of the package; it also is too small. In fact, nothing about the machine's physical controls is particularly intuitive.
In 25 years, when I look back at the history of online music distribution and Sony's role in it, I'll Google "ATRAC." ATRAC3 is Sony's proprietary compression formula for music, and its continuing cross to bear. The new Walkman will not play MP3s, or WMAs, or WAVs; its software, SoniceStage 2, must convert all files to ATRAC before they'll work with the HD1.
Depending on the extent of one's library, this can be a grueling process. On occasion, the process is interrupted for no apparent reason. Compared with the ease of shuttling songs from a Mac's iTunes program to an iPod, ATRAC3 is medieval.
On the road, the HD1's navigation wheel is used to scroll the various menus and select among artists, genres, albums, etc. This comes up when the "Mode" button is pressed; a separate "Menu" button sends you to the Play Mode. Got that?
The new iPod has a click wheel borrowed from the iPod Mini: One-thumb operations via the wheel include selecting playlists, scrolling through songs and starting play.
The HD1 is bundled with a handsome dock that doubles as a feed to (or from) the PC via a USB connector, and it's recharged using a separate, included AC adapter (the HD1 comes with headphones and a USB cable as well). Apple sort of one-ups this scheme with a dock that funnels a charge to the iPod's battery when the player is cabled (FireWire or USB) to the computer.
The Sony player works only with Windows PCs.
While the iPod gets juicier as time passes, it seems that Sony plays catch-up. Catching up is one thing; catching up to Apple guru Steve Jobs is another.
Email: steve.williams@newsday.com
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
