Thursday, September 08, 2005

Sony Corp. said on Thursday it would sell advanced Walkman portable music players later this year, aiming to move out of Apple Computer Inc.'s shadow in a market the Japanese company created a quarter of a century ago.

Sony will offer two hard disk-based music players -- one with a storage capacity of 20 gigabytes (GB) and the other with 6 GB -- and three flash memory-based players that will keep the existing models' perfume bottle appearance.

The 6 GB model is Sony's first hard-disk player with a small capacity.

Sony's new models will add the ability to automatically select and play the songs a user listens to most, and also to pick songs released in a certain year -- a function Sony calls the "time machine shuffle".

The new models will go on sale in Japan on November 19 and Sony, which introduced the first Walkman in July 1979, aims to launch them overseas by the end of the year.

The 20 GB hard-disk model, capable of storing up to 13,000 songs, is expected to retail at around 35,000 yen in Japan, Sony said.

Sony aims to sell a total of 4.5 million hard disk and flash memory portable music players in the year to next March, up from 850,000 units a year earlier.

Apple has sold about 22 million iPods worldwide since their introduction in October 2001, making it by far the most widely used player in a market that research firm In-Stat expects to nearly quadruple to 104 million units a year by 2009.