When I was younger, I never owned an ‘official’ Sony Walkman, but boy did I want one! I had various knock offs over the years, but any time I borrowed a friend’s, it was very easy to hear the differences between my BiWay brand cassette player and the Sony version! Over the last couple of years, with cassettes trying desperately to come back in style, I’ve wondered how long it would be before the Walkman was relaunched. Well, wonder no more! In November, just in time for the 40th anniversary of the first one, Sony is launching the NW-A100TPS Walkman. I was pretty excited at first until I realized that…well, it’s not a cassette player. It LOOKS just like the classic Walkman, and when you play it, you can see the little wheels of the cassette turning, but when you open the cover, it turns out that the cassette is a touch screen for your digital player! Okay, that’s really cool. What is also cool is that when you close the cover it automatically goes back to showing you the cassette through the little window. On top of that, it displays your album/song details on the label of the cassette so it looks like you’re playing a cassingle. This new Walkman is an android compatible device, fully digital (with a vinyl ‘processor’ inside to try and replicate analog sound on your digital tracks) so it’s a LOT thinner than the original device. It’s also likely a lot lighter! The storage is fairly minimal, 16gig which means that you won’t be able to keep your entire collection on it (well, I wouldn’t be able to at least) but it’s a pretty neat looking gadget.
Check out a video of the Walkman touchscreen cassette trick in action below! Not sure I’d buy one of these myself, but I’d bet they’d sound better than listening to tracks on my phone!
