New Sony devices are not likely to hurt the iPod

Michael Gartenberg | July 01, 2004, 06:45 AM

Sony finally made a move into the hard drive based portable media space with a product under the Walkman brand. The press reports about the device are wrong. The device does not support either WMA or MP3 as native file formats as the story implies. All files used on the device must be converted to Sony's ATRAC format first. This is a huge mistake and will prevent the device from making any major inroads against the iPod. While users don't care about file formats (in fact, no one outside of technology companies care about them) they do care about listening to the music they have in the format that it's in and that format for the most part is MP3. While you CAN convert the files and then transfer, that's a long and slow process (especially if you're collection is more than a gigabye in size) that most consumers won't bother with.

While I think we're going to see some credible challengers to the iPod in the very near future (in fact, I'm certain of it) this challenge from Sony will do nothing in the short term to challenge Apple in any meaningful way.