30 years on Sony declares war on iPod in clash of MP3 player titans

It burst into our lives 30 years ago, letting us listen to music on the bus, out jogging and even - in the case of some naughty schoolchildren - under the desk. But after being eclipsed by sleeker and more innovative competitors, the Sony Walkman is now staging a comeback. 

A new model, called the X Series, is threatening to snatch the title of most acclaimed portable media player from Apple’s iPod touch. The Sony X Series is able to cancel out background noise and is a major contender to Apple’s iPod Touch It might look similar to its rival on the outside, but the X Series houses some cutting-edge technology. It offers sharper pictures and video from its next generation OLED 3in touchscreen, and incorporates digital noise cancelling technology which eliminates 98 per cent of background sound.

TV sets using OLED - organic light-emitting diode - screens have a contrast rating of 1,000,000 to one, which is ten times sharper than most LCD screens. Even better, the X Series’s screen uses less power than that in rival devices such as the iPod touch so the batteries last 50 per cent longer when playing videos.

The new Walkman is also slightly smaller than the iPod touch, with a screen measuring 3in across the diagonal, compared with 3.5in. Sony claims the Walkman Series X will have cinema sound quality And there is one other key difference between the rivals - the Walkman includes an FM radio. The X Series is already gathering glowing reviews. According to the gadget website T3, it ‘isn’t just an iPod rival. It’s a Walkman saviour’.

The reviewer adds: ‘Sony invented portable music in the late 1970s and dominated for two decades. ‘Then the Apple iPod appeared and Sony didn’t so much drop the ball as meekly hand it to Apple. That’s all history now. The X Series is where the Walkman fightback begins.’

The first Walkman - a bulky portable cassette player - was reportedly invented so that Sony’s chairman could listen to his opera collection on long-haul flights. A commercial version went on sale in 1979 and was a huge success.

Today’s iPods and other media players owe much to Sony’s original ingenuity. However, the Walkman has failed to stay at the cutting edge of these developments over the past few decades. Sony spokesman Wes Deering said: ‘This is really a new era for the Walkman, and it has been a while since we have had a product we are this proud of.’