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…