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Why I love my Sony Walkman

Thursday, September 03, 2009 by Dave Winer.

My mother has a friend who was raving about the new Sony Walkman, so I bought two, one for Mom and one for me. They're not expensive, and I've never been happy with the way my iPod worked for podcasts, which is 90 percent of the use I have for them.  

Do I like it? I do! I've been using the Walkman ever since, and the iPod has become a hard disk for my BMW (which has an iPod interface). 

I like the Walkman because it works way better, for me, than the iPod does. 

The Walkman connects easily to both Mac and Windows without any weird dialogs that warn me that it's about to erase everything on the device. It presents as a disk drive. I copy files into the Podcasts sub-folder of the Music folder. When I'm out, I click the top-level Music icon then choose Folder, and navigate to the file I want and it plays. Click Next to go to the next one.  

Back at home, next time I load it up, I just empty out the folder and copy in a new batch of podcasts. Or if I'm on the road with my Windows XP netbook, or traveling with my 13 inch MacBook Pro. Or in my office using my iMac. Or at a friend's house. You get the idea. It's totally not fussy about what you connect it to, and it never gets an idea that it knows better what should be on your device than you do. 

My iPod ends up with all kinds of junk on it because even though I've been using one for seven years and I still don't understand how it works. I understood the Sony the first time I used it and it's never thrown a curveball at me. A few weeks ago I had to post here to find out how to get my iPhone out of shuffle mode. 

Apple really does do nice user interfaces, but I think they either don't understand users, or don't like or trust them. The Walkman has lots of nice features, but it's nicest feature is that it's really simple. 

BTW, last time I was in NY I saw that my mom had taken it with her on a walk and asked if she knew how to put new stuff on it, and she said yes. I consider this a major victory for tech!  

Anyway it might not be for you. But a lot of people don't know that Sony now makes a good MP3 player. Hopefully I've done my part to help correct that.