Load the Game

New Sony Walkman is seriously overpriced and a bit outdated

• Egon Kilin
• January 6th, 2015

The Sony Walkman is a concept we’ve been harboring in our hearts ever since our childhoods, with good memories surrounding the simple cassette-tape players from the iconic company. Posters with a new, redesigned Sony Walkman showed up yesterday in the halls of the CES 2015 exhibition and we were very excited to see the new gadget in action at the Sony event later on. We were expecting to see an average media player which would be a go-to device for those who don’t carry their music on their smartphones, but we were left quite disappointed.

It seems Sony doesn’t understand the concept of “throwback” nor the concept of making an iconic device affordable to those who have made it as popular as it is today. If you’re not getting what I’m going at, let me make it clear: the Sony Walkman is outrageously priced. How outrageous? $1,200. For a walkman aka a simple media player with a display. If we are to be honest, we’re not experts at analyzing media players and audio quality, but still that price is dubious to say the least. I mean it costs almost as much as the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro convertible laptop, which is a high-end computer.

Let’s not be so judgmental, though and see what the Sony Walkman brings to the table. The device is actually a competitor to the iPod Touch, as you would have expected the moment you saw the promotional posters at CES. The device is not a bad example of a music playing gadget, being capable of playing 30 hours of high quality sound and 60 hours of regular music. It can play any audio file type you can think of at up to 192 kHz quality and has an integrated HX digital amplifier. You get 128 GB internal storage and a microSD card slot if you need more.

What’s more special about the Sony Walkman is that it is an Android device outfitted with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC and LDAC sound encoding and a 4 inch touchscreen. While that doesn’t seem special, what’s more interesting is that the device runs on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and right now, you might understand why the price tag is so outrageous. Even though the Sony Walkman is a pretty nifty music player, in my mind, it’s definitely not worth as much as a laptop. Oh and did I mention that for the $1,200 price, you don’t get headphones?