Sony Introduces New A-Series MP3 Players

The WALKMAN is back. It arrives in two sizes: the NW-A3000 holds 20GB and the NW-A1000, 6GB. Both are made from a futuristic translucent material, sexy to the touch and gorgeous to look at in all its various incarnations: the 20GB comes in violet and silver, the 6GB in violet, silver, pink and blue. Even the headphones are colour coordinated. As it comes to life, the luminescent Organic EL display lightens up. The three buttons make operating the player a cinch.

Just like a mobile phone, the display features nine navigational icons on the home menu from which you can maneuver up, down, left and right to search, shuffle and access all your favourite tracks. The search method is much simpler to use than other players as it’s easy to jump straight to the artist album or song via their initials, rather than scrolling up and down a long list.

The WALKMAN features a revolutionary new ARTIST LINK function. This means that if you’re listening to an artist or track and you press the artist link button the new WALKMAN will search, find and display similar artists in that genre. What’s more, you can also choose how to ‘shuffle’. By selecting ‘My Favourite Shuffle’, the device automatically selects the most listened to 100 songs and plays them at random. The ‘Time Machine Shuffle’ function randomly selects a year and plays all of the songs from that particular year that are currently held on the device.

You can charge it up via a USB or AC adaptor while the important G-Sensor makes sure the tracks don’t skip if you knock, drop or bang it. The WALKMAN comes complete with brand new software called "CONNECT Player". This software is necessary to store, transfer and update all your tracks on your PC. And with the CONNECT music downloads fully integrated into this software, it’s easy to go on-line and download tracks from the Sony music service.