Geekiness, a personal update and then more geekiness

[longhairedhippy]

The BBC News article Sony plans Walkman to rival iPod
mentions that the new player "will play songs only in the company's own format" and that it "cannot play tunes in the popular MP3 format" - this is all due to Sony trying to get people to buy music from their online music store Sony Connect. Is it just me or is this a dumb idea? I don't know

Comments

[talma]

The Sony Walkman only plays tracking in Atrac-3 format, but the SonicStage software that you use to transfer music onto it converts mp3s etc into Atrac-3 during transfer... At least according to The Register

[gourou]

It's just a shame that ATRAC3 is OK, but unpopular, SonicStage is a *terrible* piece of software, and Sony haven't learned their lesson from MiniDisc.

On the upside, anything using ATRAC has fantastic battery life. Which could have made this device really popular *if* it had supported MP3 as well. Going to the trouble of converting one lossy format to another even more lossy format is just plain crazy.

Sony! Why! Why do you have to have at least one fatal flaw in each of your products?! Why!

[madfuzzy]

Because they just don't like paying other people to use their IP. "Why pay someone to license MP3 when you can WRITE YOUR OWN CODEC and FORCE IT ON OTHER PEOPLE!" See also: Memorystick and the UMD thingy they're going to use in the PSP (which ALSO won't play MP3s, only ATRAC files from the documentation I've seen). I could go on, but it'll just bore people...

[longhairedhippy]

PSP is the new PlayStation, isn't it?

[madfuzzy]

Yeah, it's the portable one that's meant to be out in Japan by Xmas and Europe and the US by March next year. Nice specs (PS2 quality visuals on a handheld), but potentially very poor battery life (maybe only 2-3 hours, depending on how much disc access the game is using, how hard the game is working the processors, etc).

Playstation Pocket...

[ukwarwickdood]

Problem is Tapwave (Zodiac), Nokia (Ngage) and Nintendo (Gameboy Advance) got there first. Will people be happy to buy another platform when three perfectly acceptable formats already exist, two of which are perfectly adequete to play 3D games such as Tomb Raider?