Sony to roll out Walkman A series

Entertainment giant Sony is due to launch the latest series of their Walkman digital music players. These players would be taking on the Apple iPod range of players, which are dominating the market splendidly. However, if we are to believe the trends, Sony would have a hard time competing with the latest iPod nano and iPod Video from the Macintosh maker.

Sony had announced these new Walkman A series of digital music players on September 8. Interestingly, Apple launched their iPod nano on the same date itself. The difference has been the date of availability. Apple iPod nano was made available for sale on the same day itself. Sony has delayed the launch of their Walkman A Series players for two months.

As per market reports, Apple currently has around 60% market share in the digital music player segment in Japan. Sony is struggling to touch a market share of 10%. Apple’s position has become even stronger after they launched the Japanese version of their iTunes digital content store enabling the Japanese owners of iPod to purchase and download songs from the internet.

Impressively, Apple managed to sell more than a million songs on their Japanese iTunes store within four days! Sony has become somewhat of an underdog in the market, which they used to dominate in the 1990s with their Walkman portable music players. Sony’s mainstay model of the Walkman A series comes with a large-capacity hard disk drive that can store a maximum of 13,000 tunes.