Few more evocative words for those who lived through the eighties than Walkman, right? Although the name, in the first instance, corresponds to the mythical Sony TPS-L2, over the years it ended up becoming the generic name that the young people of those days used to refer to portable cassette tape players. Times in which the tapes, whether they were the official ones of the artists, compilations of various kinds or radio recordings, took up a good amount of space in our backpacks. Oh, how young we were.
Well, sorry for the digression, but you can believe me when I say that this is precisely what Sony is appealing to with the Walkman NW-A306a device that has just been announced by the Japanese technology company, a digital audio player (another piece that is also beginning to be the subject of nostalgia) that combines what a device of this type can offer in this decade, with a design that, In some way, it is intended to be reminiscent of the brand’s classic players.
Thus, on the front in which we saw the movement of the tape reel in the eighties models, this Walkman NW-A306 has a 3.6-inch TFT touch screen with 720p resolution (1,280 x 720 points), and on the side where the buttons to control the device were, we find physical buttons again, although much smaller than those of those times. We changed the batteries from then, yes, for a battery capable of providing a range of up to 26 hours of playback through applications and up to 36 hours of playback of 44.1 KHz FLAC files.
The music player is true to its role with users only being able to download music and subscription-based music streaming apps like YouTube and Spotify, despite being equipped with Android 12, it seems Sony doesn’t want this Walkman NW -A306 ends up being used as an email reader, calculator, to play games, etc. We can interpret it as an unnecessary limitation or as a proposal that when you listen to music you don’t get distracted by unnecessary details, this is up to the consumer.
As for its storage capacity, it has an internal memory of 32 gigabytes, but in the technical specifications Sonya already tells us that, in reality, we can only have 18 of them that, fortunately, we can expand using a MicroSD memory card. . It has WiFi connectivity (802.11 A/B/G/N) and Bluetooth 5.0, to which we must add a USB C port and, of course, a minijack.
Does such a device make sense? Before answering, you should know that its price will be $375, although Sony focuses on the sound quality it provides. In my opinion, it only makes sense if this Walkman NW-A306 provides sound quality well above that offered by smartphones. Or, of course, if you are one of those people who finds comfort in nostalgia and who wants to leave the house with a Walkman again. Of course, without tapes and without those insane headphones that we used in the eighties.
More information
