Sony's new 6GB and 20GB Walkman players

Sony launched a new Walkman to counter Apple's new 2GB and 4GB iPod nano players. The new Walkman is available in two capacities, the NW-A3000 has a 20GB hard drive and the smaller NW-A1000 is equipped with a 6GB hard drive to store all your music.

These new players feature an 'Artist Link' function which will search every artist, album and song stored on the device and offer you a list of artist and bands closely linked to the genre of music being played at the time. There's also a 'My Favourite Shuttle' feature to automatically select and shuffle between the 100 most played songs. Then there's also the 'Time Machine Shuffle' function to randomly select a year and play all of the songs from that particular year that are currently stored on the device.

The 20GB version has a 2-inch advanced organic EL display and the 6GB model has a 1.5-inch one. Both models offer ATRAC3plus and MP3 playback and once switched one these Walkmans will offer you a mobile phone style Home menu with nine different options that can be selected via the four-way directional button. These include ‘Music Library’, ‘Play Mode’, ‘Initial Search’, ‘Intelligent Shuffle’, ‘Favorite 100’, ‘Play History’, ‘Settings’, ‘Playlist’ and ‘Now Playing’.

Music can be searched through in a variety of ways: via ‘Genre’, ‘Artist’, ‘Album’, ‘Song’, ‘Release Date’, ‘Rating’ and ‘Recently Transferred’. Sony's new Walkman records three years of playback history that can be searched and also features the first ever ‘Initial Search’ on a hard disc device, allowing the user to scroll from A-Z for ultimate ease of use.

The 20GB version is available in violet and silver while the 6GB version comes in the additional colours of pink and blue, colour-matched headphones are also included in the package.

Sony also launched a range of accessories such as carrying cases, a docking station, a remote control and a docking speaker system. The 20GB NW-A3000 will cost about $319 and the NW-A1000 should retail at $269.