Digital Home Thoughts: Sony Touch Walkman Materializes

"Incorporating a wide 3-inch OLED touch screen, the display delivers a picture with extremely high contrast, exceptional color reproduction and a rapid response time. Usability is also enhanced with this model as the device utilizes both touch panel operation and a hybrid button system to improve upon the navigation experience."

Sony revealed its rumoured touch-enabled Walkman at CES 2009. The NWZ-X1000 strikes back against Apple's iPod Touch and is armed with several new features to do this. It includes digital noise cancellation, an OLED touch screen and Wi-Fi connectivity with web browsing and YouTube support. The walkman itself is also smaller than the iPod Touch, making it very pocketable. The interface looks fairly slick, and the hardware buttons are a nice touch, however will it be enough to act as a strong competitor to the iPod empire? Without a direct analog to the iTunes store, I'm not holding my breath.