SONY WALKMAN PICKS UP THE PACE 27/10/2004

Sony has added two Flash music players to its Network WALKMAN line up, the first in the range to support the popular MP3 file format. The 512MB NW-E95 and 1GB NW-E99 are much smaller than the WALKMANs of yesteryear, weighing only 40g and coming with a strap for draping the player around your neck.

Both models have a generous battery life of 70 hours. Listeners can enjoy up to 46 albums’ worth of songs on the 1GB NW-E99 when tracks are in Sony’s ATRAC3plus compression format. You could fit roughly 25 albums in MP3 format, which averages 3MB per song. Owners of the older NW-E55 and NW-E75 models will be able to download software to enable these devices to play MP3 files starting the end of October.

Over 300,000 ATRAC3 tracks are available online at Sony’s digital music site at www.connect-europe.com. The NW-E95 and NW-E99 go on sale at the end of November, pricing to be confirmed.

Contact: www.sony.co.uk