I think the fact that, after a full day, no-one has posted a comment on this story yet speaks volumes.

If these were sans Sony and Walkman badge, would anyone give 'em a second look?

Very nice, this seems to be a replacement for their budget S-series players.

If the sound quality is anything like their A and S-series, then Sony will have another winner from the non-ipod crowd.

I fail to understand your point, many articles here have no comments, you point?

Just to keep you happy...

I'm almost tempted to upgrade my NW-A3000 to one of these, but the step back from 20GBHDD to 8GBflash is too much. I might be tempted at 16GB unit, but would more likely wait for a 32GB unit.

When will vendors realise that people don't want iPod clones, and be brave enough to move away from the do-it-all format?

I just want a music player, that has a nice, easy to use UI, sounds great, and has ooddles of space.

Everything about the iPod is so wrong, the sound quality is abysmal, as is the build quaility, it's packed with useless non-core features like video playback and such. About the only thing they got right, is the UI.

I've always liked the look of Sony MP3 players but have never taken the plunge because of the awful SonicStage software. Now it seems you need to use Itunes or Windows Media Player to transfer. Why can't they just give us a USB Mass Storage option, then I'd rush out and buy one tomorrow?

Also, I bet the quoted 76 hours' battery life is for 48kbps ATRAC-encoded files, probably more like 20 for mp3s.

Sony players are officially MTP compliant (and can be forced into UMS). You do not have to use softwares to transfer music. Personally I use Mediamonkey on Windows but I can drag and drop in Linux.

My A818, which I have been using for a few months now, isn't even compatible with Atrac3... and has a battery life of more than 30 hours when playing back WMAs encoded at 160kbps.

Please do more research before leaving snarky comments that make you look like an idiot.