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The Sony Walkman NW-A300. It is a disgrace Sony by no means grew to become a pressure in smartphones, as a result of, wow, their product designs are nonetheless so good.
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Yep, that is common Android.
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The underside. From left to proper we have got a headphone jack, lanyard gap, USB-C port, and a microSD slot.
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Music buttons! So many music buttons!
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The again has this good scallop texture.
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The body is aluminum.
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It is available in colours. That grey one actually hits me within the nostalgic Sony candy spot.
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There are little folio instances! They’re so cute.
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The folio case lets it get up!
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Sony has a pair of recent Android Walkmans out, the NW-A300 and NW-ZX700. Sure, that is proper, Walkmans, Sony’s legendary music participant model from the Eighties. Apple might have given up on the thought of a smartphone-adjacent music participant when it killed the iPod Contact line just lately, however Sony nonetheless makes Android-powered Walkmans and has for some time. The primary was in 2012 with the Android 2.3 Gingerbread-powered NWZ-Z1000, which seemed like Sony simply stripped the modem out of an Xperia cellphone and shoved it onto the market as a music participant. Since then, Sony has made designs with extra purpose-built {hardware}, and right now there are a complete sequence of Android-powered Walkman music gamers on the market. Sadly these new ones appear to solely be on the market in Japan, the UK, and Europe, for now.
We’ll begin with essentially the most consumer-friendly of the 2, the NW-A300. This primary design debuted in 2019 with the NW-A105, however that shipped with Android 9. That is an upgraded model of that system with a less-ancient model of Android, a brand new SoC, and a scalloped again design. In Sony’s house of Japan, the 32GB model is 46,000 yen (about $360), whereas in Europe, it is 399 euro (about $430).
The NW-A300 is a tiny little system that measures 56.6×98.5×12 mm, so fairly near a deck of taking part in playing cards. And actually, simply look at these photos. Sony may not be the buyer electronics juggernaut it was, however it nonetheless has an unbelievable product design division. I’ve no use for a standalone music participant, however each of those Walkmans are so fairly that I simply wish to maintain one.
The entrance is dominated by a 3.6-inch, 60 Hz, 1280×720 touchscreen LCD. There’s 32GB of storage, and the system helps Wi-Fi 802.11AC and Bluetooth 5. That is about all Sony needs to speak about for official specs. It touts “longer battery life” however will not say how huge the battery is, promising solely “36 hours* of 44.1 KHz FLAC playback, as much as 32 hours* of 96 KHz FLAC Excessive-Decision Audio playback.” Presumably, that is all with the display off.
For extra specs, we are able to go to The Walkman Weblog, an exquisite website that could be very critical about these little music gamers. In October, the positioning discovered documentation for the A300 itemizing a 1500 mAh battery. The system-on-a-chip within the older NW-A100 mannequin was the NXP i.MX8M-Mini, a wildly sluggish 28 nm SoC that has simply 4 Arm Cortex-A53 CPUs and 4GB of RAM. You possibly can say, “That is only a music participant,” however that is not likely true because it nonetheless runs full Android with an app retailer and the whole lot. Geekbench scores present this has a brand new quad-core Qualcomm chip of some sort with 4GB of RAM, however we won’t make sure of the mannequin quantity. A more moderen chip with smaller transistors would most likely account for lots of that “higher battery life” promise.
It is a music participant, so after all, there is a headphone jack on the underside of the unit. You may additionally discover a spot for a lanyard, a speedy USB-C 3.2 Gen1 port for fast music transfers, and a MicroSD slot for storing all of your music. Buttons alongside the aspect of the system additionally offer you each music management you would need, like a maintain change, earlier, play/pause, subsequent, quantity controls, and energy.
