Sony has been busy with its Walkman line of products, and has announced the new A-series together with expanding the existing S-series. The A-series are pretty promising and they seem to be Sony’s thinnest offerings so far but are unfortunately not available outside of Japan yet.
The A-series comes in three flavors – the 16GB (NW-A84), the 32GB (NW-A846) and the 64GB version (NW-A847) all packing a 2.8 inch OLED screen at 240x400, FM radio and TV-out. It weighs in at 62.37 grams (2.2 ounces) and is only 7.2mm thick. It comes with MPEG-4, AVC and WMV video support, and MP3, WMA, ATRAC, PCM and AAC. It is PS3 compatible and brings some new features, such as drag’n’drop auto-transcoding video from your computer.
The A-series is good enough for 29 hours for music and 9 hours of video viewing on a single charge. After conversion from Yen, the 16GB version costs $226, the 32GB $332 and the 64GB will set you back about $443. It comes in brown and black and comes with excellent MDR-EX300SL earphones . It’s set to launch in Japan on October 31st, but there’s no mention of other regions as of yet nor whether the earphones will be offered outside of Japan.
The S-series has been updated as well in the form of S640 and S740, both of which come with 2-inch LCDs and 720x480 TV-out and the same earphones that come with the A-series. The S740 will come in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB flavors and will feature noise cancellation whereas the S640 comes in 8GB and 16GB versions and will feature ambient noise filtration.
The newly announced S-series models will be good for 42 hours of music (128kbps mp3) which is pretty impressive and 10 hours of MPEG-4 video at 384kbps. The players support MP3, WMA, AAC, HE-AAC, ATRAC, ATRAC AL and PCM for audio and AVC (H2.64), MPEG-4 and WMV for video.
The S640K Series comes in pink, blue, orange and white and the pricing is as follows: the NW-S644 (8GB) costs about $153 and the NW-645 (16GB) costs about $186. The S740 comes in in black, gold, green and violet and the pricing is as follows: the 8GB version (NW-S744) costs about $175, the 16GB (NW-S745) costs about $208 and the 32GB version (NW-S746) will set you back about $274.
The A-Series
The S-Series, (S-640 on the left, S-740 on the right)