The MP3 player market has been heating up in recent weeks with big names like Creative and Apple showing off its latest wares to the world. And whether it is by crafty design or ignorant happenstance, Sony has also decided to spill the beans on its latest hard drive MP3 players to date.
The granddaddy of the portable audio player seems to have thrown in its lot behind the OLED display. Resembling the NW-E505’s embedded see-through display, this new hard drive MP3 player seems to be the recipient of a spillover effect and may spell a new design philosophy for the Japanese brand as far as MP3 players are concerned.
Sporting a clickable quad-directional joypad, with an Option and a Back button, the arrangement of the controls seem like a hardware portrait of a child’s soap bubbles. It’s certainly very different from the linear design inherent in previous hard drive models like the NW-HD5 and NW-HD3, but it suits the fun-loving NW-A3000’s gentle curves to a T.

Along with four different color iterations, this new Sony MP3 player also comes with optional purchases which includes a docking cradle, various pouches and a dedicated speaker dock.
A notable feature is the new Artist Link function which apparently recommends songs to the user (via a preview of the song) based on music from the hard drive memory which most closely resembles the current playing track. Besides the old Shuffle function, Sony has also included a new Time Machine Shuffle feature which gather tunes from a specified time period. It seems that Sony is milking ID3 tags combos for all it’s worth.
Besides the new automated music-seeking features which also include an alphabetical search by initials, the NW-A3000 offers precious few innovations. There is the standard codec support (ATRAC3 and MP3), G-sensor protection (stops the hard drive upon sudden acceleration like a fall) and a two-color OLED display that looks positively antiquated in an age of color-screen MP3 players.
This new Walkman line up that also includes the NW-A1000 (smaller screen and a 6GB capacity) and the NW-A600 (flash-based with 512MB/1GB/2GB storage flavors) seems to be Sony’s direct answer to the iPod cartel which has been wrecking havoc on the Japanese company’s home turf. However with Apple sacking the iPod mini in favor of the new iPod nano, it may just have thrown a spanner into Sony’s well-laid plans.

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