Sony VAIO Pocket - Blends Top-End Audio Player with Digital Photo Album

New Vaio Pocket offers 20,000 songs, 20 hours non-stop operation, intelligent playlists & photos too

Brussels, 14 September 2004 – The new Sony VAIO Pocket player/viewer range is to be launched with 2 models – the 20Gb VGF-AP1 (VGFAP1) and the 40Gb VGF-APL (VGFAPL) - a new class of dual function media players aimed at the discerning, style-aware consumer, will hit the stores across a select number of European countries in October.

Not only does the launch introduce a completely novel combination of picture viewer and intelligent audio player, it marks a key point in the evolution of the VAIO concept.

The Sony VAIO Pocket is the first VAIO product to go beyond the conventional limits of the IT world in the sense that it is not a notebook, a PC or a handheld organiser. Future VAIO products will continue to reflect the broadening scope of the brand while remaining focused on its core value: developing the potential of digital audio-visual technology.

The Sony VAIO Pocket exemplifies the VAIO ideal perfectly. It offers users a personal library of thousands of pieces of their favourite music, but uniquely it also acts as a tiny digital photo album. With the Sony VAIO Pocket, users can store and view their photographs, creating a compendium of experiences and moods to be enjoyed and shared whenever and wherever they want.

The Sony VAIO Pocket is also perfectly suited to general use as an external, portable hard disk. With 20GB and 40GB versions available, users have the option of keeping significant amounts of data on the player as well as music and pictures.

The Sony VAIO Pocket uses miniature hard disk technology to give users immense personal storage capacity of up to 10,000 songs (with the 20GB VGF-AP1*) or up to 20,000 songs (with the 40 GB VGF-APL*). The Vaio Pocket can communicate with PCs and even link directly with digital cameras, making it easy to build up a huge collection of sounds and images that fits into the palm of the hand. Sophisticated system design ensures the necessary stamina, with up to 20 hours of non-stop playback from a single battery charge.

The Sony VAIO Pocket has a hybrid technology LCD screen designed to be viewed in daylight without difficulty, and delivers top quality, high colour reproduction of digital images. In general use the Vaio Pocket’s LCD screen displays the intuitive and powerful Grid Sense interface, which makes the VAIO Pocket so simple to operate.

Touching the bump-textured area beside the screen selects and activates on-screen buttons directly, and in a way which instantly feels natural. This fingertip control is augmented by intelligence within the Sony VAIO Pocket itself which monitors what users listen to, and when, then builds up playlists which can be revisited at any time. Without ever thinking about it, users link their own soundtracks to different moods and activities and the VAIO Pocket preserves them for future enjoyment.

A cradle charger provides all the necessary connections for collecting content from a camera or PC, and even an audio output for listening to music through conventional speakers. In addition a sophisticated remote control makes track selection simple thanks to a highly readable three-line backlit display ideal for browsing song titles. Powerful Sony software for managing music on the PC, via Sonic Stage v.2.1, and rapid-fire drag and drop file transfers to the VAIO Pocket comes as part of the package. In addition music downloads can be done easily via the Sony Connect Service that launched in June (in UK, France and Germany only), which has a pick of over 300,000 songs downloadable in ATRAC 3 format.
(* using ATRACPlus 64Kbps mode at 4 min per song).

NOTES TO THE EDITOR

Sony VAIO Pocket concept

The Sony VAIO Pocket design grew out of the challenges that arose from the central concept: a tiny multi-purpose data store with huge internal capacity. The sheer amount of music the Sony VAIO Pocket can hold required an imaginative approach to prevent the user simply getting lost in the detail, so the idea of smart search evolved. With the player itself keeping track of listening patterns over time, and recording the user’s preferences, finding music and re-capturing moods expressed by particular selections of music becomes one of the player’s central and most intuitive features.

Any search, smart or otherwise, is no good unless the physical user interface is fast and straightforward, which led to the development of Grid Sense, with its instantly comprehensible visual-tactile feedback.

Finally, the need to create a truly multimedia device required a small colour display with exceptional qualities, specifically the ability to display photo-realistic colour depth, and to be readable outdoors. Now all the engineers and designers had to do was fuse all these elements into a tiny, elegant but robust whole, and the Sony VAIO Pocket would be a reality…

VAIO Pocket in close-up:

Inside

The Sony VAIO Pocket player/viewer weighs approximately 195g for the 20 GB version and 205g for the 40 GB version, and measures 63.3mm x 115.2mm and is between 20.7mm thick (for 40GB version) and 17.3mm thick (for 20GB version) . At the heart of the player is a tiny 1.8-inch hard disk offering high-speed storage and retrieval of 20GB or 40GB of music and pictures. A built-in Lithium-ion battery provides up to 20 hours non-stop play.

Screen

The Sony VAIO Pocket has a specially engineered screen capable of being used outdoors, unlike conventional LCDs. It has a 2.2-inch viewable diagonal and delivers 262,144 colours for lifelike photographic reproduction. Its native QVGA+ resolution means a crisp, finely grained image displayed on a 320 x 240 matrix.

Grid Sense

Next to the screen, the surface of the device is touch-sensitive. The user moves a fingertip around a grid of raised bumps and the motion is tracked by the highlight on the screen. The visual/tactile feedback from the bump grid gives the user a unique and intuitive feel for just how to move around the on-screen controls. Increased pressure on the grid triggers the selected control, rather like tapping on a notebook touch pad.

Formats

Users can transfer MP3 and Windows WMA formats onto their VAIO Pocket, which in the process get converted into ATRAC3plus. ATRAC3plus is a newer standard than ATRAC3. Originally it was developed in 1992 as a means of squeezing down Audio CD format music onto MiniDisc. It works by removing inaudible sound frequencies from the audio signal, reducing its size without any perceptible degradation of sound quality, as a result ATRAC3plus is a superior compression standard to MP3. The original system could squeeze down data to about 1/5 of its original size, but ATRAC3plus achieves a compression rate approximately 20 times higher than conventional Audio CD. Using ATRAC3plus, a 20GB capacity VAIO Pocket can hold a maximum of 10,000 tracks of 4 minutes in length, recorded at the highest quality 64kbps mode.

Cradle

The Sony VAIO Pocket is supplied with a cradle charger, which also has the necessary ports for communicating with other devices. There’s a standard USB 2.0 port for the PC link and a mini-USB 1.1 port for making a direct connection to a digital camera. It also features a line-level output for sending the audio signal to an external amplifier or speakers when users want to listen to music on a full-sized sound system rather than headphones.

Software

Sony’s SonicStage 2.1 software is provided to help users both download and manage music collections on their PC or notebook. Music files can be transferred to the player by simply dragging and dropping them onto the Easy Transfer application which accompanies SonicStage. This new version allows you to link and download immediately from Sony Connect music download service without using a web browser.