List of Sony Walkman products

It is the lightest MD Walkman ever produced, weighing 55 g (including built-in rechargeable battery) with a thickness of 9.9 mm.

Unlike NetMD, Hi-MD Walkmans allow two-way digital transfers to and from PCs virtually unrestricted.

This offers sound quality equal to CD (as opposed to lossy ATRAC codecs used on standard MiniDisc/ NetMD).

Hi-MD Walkmans introduced from 2005 onwards allowed direct playback of MP3s without the need to transcode the MP3s to ATRAC format.

[21] Sony also advertised the player as having "robust" copyright protection by adhering to standards including Secure Digital Music Initiative.

In 2000 the current "W." logo was created to fit more easily on the increasingly shrinking size of devices, and the Walkman brand was unified.

The devices were much more expensive than competing iRiver and Mpio players that did not require SonicStage or ATRAC transcoding.

Due to its price and limited capacity, it was still largely ignored by the general public and shared the fate of its MS70D sister.

[21] The NW-MS70D, released in Europe in 2003, was the first device using Sony's Virtual Mobile Engine (VME) digital signal processor.

As Sony was losing market relevance amid the widespread success of Apple's iPod range, the company developed for the first time a hard disk-based player.

[34] Sony's next model, the NW-HD5, was announced in April 2005 and released July 2005[35] and was an updated design from the HD1 / HD3, boasting a simpler control system, an upright handheld format,[36] a user-removable lithium-ion battery, better file format compatibility, a unique "Follow Turn Display" that would automatically align itself based on how the player was held on startup, and updated software.

A main feature was its advertised running time of 40 hours, when using low-quality format settings, i.e., 48 kbit/s ATRAC3 files, and no player-based audio enhancements (although the player does include these).

Unfortunately, the NW-HD5 was shipped with a cosmetic design flaw which meant that the buttons developed small visible cracks under their plastic coating.

[37] In January 2006, the NW-HD5 became unavailable as a normal purchase from retail electronics stores and was relegated to online auction sites and used-electronics warehouses as a consumer item.

The B Series are ultra portable, entry-level, USB thumb drive style players for the overseas market.

It also could record CDs directly from a Sony compatible Hifi system via USB connection without any PC (the NWD-B105 also supported WMA files).

It also came with a three-line colour display; the voice recorder (MP3) came with bit rates of low (96 kbit/s), mid (128 kbit/s) and high.

The B180 series consists of one 4 GB model, NWZ-B183, and its FM radio variant NWZ-B183F, and has 20 hours of battery life.

The first series, F800, came with Android Ice Cream Sandwich software and was also the first Sony Walkman to support the FLAC format.

[48] The M Series (sole model NW-M505) is a small thumb drive styled player released in Japan in December 2013 for 18,000 yen.

The NW-S4 Sports Network Walkman had a sleek pen shape and a sporty water resistant design and came with an arm strap and 64 megabyte of embedded flash memory.

It was the first Walkman with Zappin, a Sony function which allows the user to browse through tracks by playing a snippet of the chorus of each song.

[59] In January 2016, the WS410 series (WS413 and WS414) were announced with a new salt water and dust proof design, and an Ambient Sound feature.

Like the WS410, it has improvements in salt water and dust resistance, and it also now has the ability to play FLAC audio files.

[61] Introduced at IFA 2016, the NW-WM1A is a top-end portable media player retailing for €1200, and has 128 GB internal memory.

A gold plated edition called NW-WM1Z was also released, retailing for €3300 as part of Sony's Signature Series.

[64] The Sony Walkman X series was a touchscreen audio and video player that was on the market from 2009 to 2010, designed to compete against the iPod Touch.

[65] It has a 3-inch (76 mm) OLED touch screen, internet access through Wi-Fi and digital noise-cancelling as well as applications for Slacker and YouTube.

Walkman-branded mobile phones by Sony Ericsson were first released to Japan in 2006, under partnership with operator KDDI (owned by au).

Sony has partnered with various companies, brands, and music bands to release special Walkman digital audio players (most exclusive to Japan).