San Diego — Sony announced pricing and availability of its flagship X-Series portable media player (PMP), which debuted at January’s International CES as the company’s first Walkman equipped with touchscreen and Wi-Fi.
The X-series Walkman comes in two versions: the 16GB NWZ-X1051 and 32GB NWZ-X1061. Both are
due in Sony Style stores and select retailers nationwide in mid-June at an expected everyday $299 and $399, respectively. They’re already available for presale on www.sonystyle.com.
The devices can be operated through hard buttons and a touchscreen, which features a 3-inch-wide OLED display with a 180-degree viewing angle and WQVGA resolution. Via Wi-Fi, it browses the Web, streams YouTube videos, downloads Slacker Radio content, downloads podcasts and connects to other content-download sites, including subscription-based music-download sites.
It’s the industry’s first PMP player with noise-canceling headphones, the company said. Other features include airplane mode, FM tuner and a screen-scroll feature that lets users swipe across the screen to scroll forward and backward through videos at a user-selected time increment.
The device plays the following audio formats: MP3, AAC, protected WMA, PCM and protected-WMA subscription downloads. In video, it plays H.264/AVC, MPEG-4 and protected WMV. The embedded battery delivers up to 33 hours of music playback or up to nine hours of video playback.
When connecting via Wi-Fi to the Slacker service, consumers select up to three stations, or playlists. Slacker then pushes hundreds of songs to the device at no charge. The playlists can be refreshed with new songs whenever the device is in a Wi-Fi network. Slacker also lets users customize channels by pressing “favorite” and “ban” buttons on playback, enabling Slacker to deliver only the type of songs that a user likes.
The noise-canceling feature can be used even if music and videos aren’t playing, and consumer can enjoy its benefits when tapping into a plane’s in-flight A/V system via included accessory cable. Different noise-canceling DSP modes are available for use in planes, trains and buses, and offices.
