Try as I might, it’s proving really difficult to get excited about anything Sony does these days. Their supposed iPod killer, the ever-so-snappily-titled Network Walkman NW-HD1 turns out to be the kind of half-hearted attempt that has come to characterise Sony of late – despite the reasonable spec, they still haven’t moved away from the ATRAC-only format. So it’s not going to support MP3 without some god-awful bodgy conversion process, and no doubt the bundled software will be PC-only and suitably brain-dead. The last time I used Sonic Stage was while attempting to download files onto a Clie, and about the only thing it was good for was causing Blue Screens Of Death. Although interestingly enough, it doesn’t have a Memory Stick, for which we should all be eternally thankful.
And it’s not just the music hardware division that gets lawyered – the Librie e-book reader is the first to have an e-ink screen, making it potentially the must-have gadget of the decade, and promptly renders itself completely useless by lumbering it by with DRM that causes your ebooks to explode after 60 days.
