An exciting day for mobile music

Apple just reveled several new products yesterday, but before the excitement had time to fade, Sony also released new products. The mobile music market is getting in hotter battle with time. Seems like Apple and Sony are going to dual it off with their iPods and Walkmans. The result? Many great choices for us customers.

Apple:

The iPod Nano was the most significant bomb here. Completly replacing the iPod mini, it comes in 2gig and 4gig flavors, and using flash memory, instead of relatively fragile Hard disks. Also, as a result, they're extreemly thin (Apple compared it to a pencil), have better battery life. But what makes me like it so much, is that there's finally a black colored iPod, with a color screen. iPods are certainly getting better.

Also just out, is the Motorola iTunes phone, named ROKR. Which, in my opnion, is great software in ugly hardware. Crap. Apple should've designed the casing.

On the software side, iTunes was just upgraded to version 5. The big change is a more beautiful look, and integrated language packs(which makes iTunes be in the same language as your OS). The search function is also super charged. But, no big changes since it's already so good a piece of software that there's not much places to improve.

Sony:
Now, the revenge of the old Walkman kingdom.

First of all, the Walkman A series. There's the A3000 and A1000 series which has a 20gig and 6gig HD, respectivly. And the flash based A600, from 2gig to 256MB, which is just an upgrade of the previous E500/E400 series. All use dazling mono colored OLEDs, which although not a color screen, are still vary cool. They are touting a new built-in music search function and cool designs. However, I guess I can't say much before I get to play with one.

And, comming with the new walkmans, Sony included a whole new software to replace the highly critisized Sonicstage: The Connect player. Don't know much about it yet, since I can't find much about it on Sony's site, but looks like an iTunes clone at my first sight of a thumbnail. Although I believe that Sony isn't a company that likes to copy form other, I hope that it'll be as easy to use as iTunes. However, 1 bas thing. While iTunes and Sonicstage are free downloads, the Connect player seems to only come with the new walkmans for now.