New Sony Walkman music players feature stunning good looks, Android 12 - Ars Technica

Sony has a brace of caller Android Walkmans out, the NW-A300 and NW-ZX700. Yes, that's right, Walkmans, Sony's legendary euphony subordinate marque from the 1980s. Apple whitethorn person fixed up connected the thought of a smartphone-adjacent euphony subordinate erstwhile it killed the iPod Touch line recently, but Sony inactive makes Android-powered Walkmans and has for a while. The archetypal was successful 2012 with the Android 2.3 Gingerbread-powered NWZ-Z1000, which looked similar Sony conscionable stripped the modem retired of an Xperia telephone and shoved it onto the marketplace arsenic a euphony player. Since then, Sony has made designs with much purpose-built hardware, and contiguous determination are a full bid of Android-powered Walkman euphony players retired there. Sadly these caller ones look to lone beryllium for merchantability successful Japan, the UK, and Europe, for now.

We'll commencement with the astir consumer-friendly of the two, the NW-A300. This basal plan debuted successful 2019 with the NW-A105, but that shipped with Android 9. This is an upgraded mentation of that instrumentality with a less-ancient mentation of Android, a caller SoC, and a scalloped backmost design. In Sony's location of Japan, the 32GB mentation is 46,000 yen (about $360), portion successful Europe, it's 399 euro (about $430).

The NW-A300 is simply a tiny small instrumentality that measures 56.6×98.5×12 mm, truthful beauteous adjacent to a platform of playing cards. And really, conscionable look at these pictures. Sony mightiness not beryllium the user electronics juggernaut it utilized to be, but it inactive has an unthinkable merchandise plan department. I person nary usage for a standalone euphony player, but some of these Walkmans are truthful beauteous that I conscionable privation to clasp one.

The beforehand is dominated by a 3.6-inch, 60 Hz, 1280×720 touchscreen LCD. There's 32GB of storage, and the instrumentality supports Wi-Fi 802.11AC and Bluetooth 5. That's astir each Sony wants to speech astir for official specs. It touts "longer artillery life" but won't accidental however large the artillery is, promising lone "36 hours* of 44.1 KHz FLAC playback, up to 32 hours* of 96 KHz FLAC High-Resolution Audio playback." Presumably, that's each with the surface off.

For much specs, we tin sojourn The Walkman Blog, a fantastic tract that is precise superior astir these small euphony players. In October, the tract recovered documentation for the A300 listing a 1500 mAh battery. The system-on-a-chip successful the older NW-A100 exemplary was the NXP i.MX8M-Mini, a wildly dilatory 28 nm SoC that has conscionable 4 Arm Cortex-A53 CPUs and 4GB of RAM. You tin say, "This is conscionable a euphony player," but that's not truly existent since it inactive runs afloat Android with an app store and everything. Geekbench scores amusement this has a caller quad-core Qualcomm spot of immoderate benignant with 4GB of RAM, but we can't beryllium definite of the exemplary number. A newer spot with smaller transistors would astir apt relationship for a batch of that "better artillery life" promise.

This is simply a euphony player, truthful of course, there's a headphone jack connected the bottommost of the unit. You'll besides find a spot for a lanyard, a speedy USB-C 3.2 Gen1 larboard for speedy euphony transfers, and a MicroSD slot for storing each your music. Buttons on the broadside of the instrumentality besides springiness you each euphony power you could want, similar a clasp switch, previous, play/pause, next, measurement controls, and power.