Sony W202 Walkman - If Less is More, There's No End to These

Sony's recently released NWZ-W202 Walkman is finally small enough to be completely enclosed inside a pair of behind the ear bud headphones. While several attempts have been made to do this before most of them have turned out a bit to clunky to see much wide use. These actually resemble the popular Motorola S9 Bluetooth headphones but don't require any sort of wireless connection to play music. These headDAPhones if you will pack 2GB of on-board memory and an internal Li-ion battery that is rated at 12 hours of playback. Like the iPod shuffle classic and its new and improved version, there's no display screen to speak of. Eh, who needs all this AMOLED junk, right?

Unfortunately the NWZ-W202 Walkman doesn't have any talkback functions for navigation, but it employs "Zappin". Zappin is the name it gives to its sound-bite navigation assistance system. Trying a little too hard, Zappin acts as a thoughtful cue-seek function. It plays what is (in its cyber-judgement) a "clear" 4 or 15 second section of each song and loop through all songs until you find the song you are looking for. Probably nice for pedestrian listening but may be a little distracting for active use. A few other speed bumps mar this device. Notably, the exposure of the USB connection to sweat, dust and detritus as well as a slightly over-sized ear wires which could annoy wearers of eyeglasses. Happily though it supports file transfer as a USB mass storage devices which frees it from reliance on any Rhapsody / iTunes software. Availability isn't in stone, but look for it in a few months for around $70.