The Sony Sports Walkman, first introduced as a cassette player in 1984, has always had a loyal brand following even as the Apple iPod has come to dominate the portable audio space in today?s market. Sony is hoping to draw on the nostalgia of Sports Walkman fans with the introduction of the S2 Sports Walkman, due out in stores in September.
The Sony S2 Sports Walkman, according to its maker, incorporates favorite features from the only Walkmans such as being water resistant while keeping in step with 21st century technology.
For starters, the made from aluminum S2 offers two different sizes of flash memory storage ? 2GB and 1GB ? to store upwards of 1,350 songs copied over from a PC. Compatible music file types include AAC, MP3, WMA and Sony?s own ATRAC and the S2 also supports downloadable music from the Sony online music service known as CONNECT Music.
Beyond just simple straight playback of your favorite workout audio tracks the S2, which has a cylindrical design about the size of a lipstick tube and fits in the included armband, sports a feature called Music Pacer. This rather unique offering monitors your workout tempo, changing to the appropriate stored music to fit your speed. This feature is joined by something called Shuffle Shake, which lets you put the player into a shuffle mode (i.e. songs are played randomly) by shaking the player three times within two seconds.
In helping you as a workout accessory, the S2 has the ability to track step, distance and calories burned from your last seven workouts for tracking your progress.
You can also set a built-in stopwatch to time yourself or activate a special time feature which lets you tell the S2 how long you are going to work out so that it plays music until that moment. This latter feature also works via calories burned or distance traveled.
Other features of the black S2 Sports Walkman include a built-in FM tuner, upwards of 18 hours of listening time via the quick charge rechargeable battery, an on-board sound equalizer, a one-line organic electroluminescence (OEL) display which accommodates both left-handed and right-handed users for displaying sound track and title names, multi-language display support and USB 2.0 compatibility for faster transfer of music from a computer.
More details on the Sony S2 Sports Walkman can be found at Sony?s Web site.