Sony A840 Flagship Walkman - DAP Without Compromise

One thing obvious about new 2009 Sony tactile-control Walkmans is that they all share a similar three circle button design whether it's S-or the E-series. Now that Sony has debuted this razor-thin A-series sharing the same characteristic, consumers might have even a more difficult time telling them apart. Of course, after another look into the specs, you know what you are paying for.

For starter, Sony A840 has a 2.8" 240x400 OLED versus 2.4" 240x320 LCD of the S540. Note the extra amount of pixels which is for movies and slideshows. Additionally, swapping out the LCD in favor of OLED gives better color reproduction and improves battery life, which in the case of A840, boasts 29 hours and 9 hours of music and video playback respectively. Excess thickness is trimmed down to a mere 0.28", and weight reduced to 2.1 oz. The case looks like it's plastic, but the shiny controls are more like made of aluminum.

Also unique to the Sony A840 are S-master amplifier; noise-cancelling feature (must be used with the bundled headphones); content transfer compatibility with Sony Blu-ray recorders; and lyrics-audio sync (works more like Karaoke); and high bit-rate support for videos (10Mbps for AVC, 6Mbps for MPEG-4 / WMV). Lastly, you can get it with 64GB, but the price tag is a staggering $442 USD. The 16GB and 32GB will also be available at $265 and $331.