It's a snowy day and I'm stuck at home, fueled on tea and a desire to speak my peace to Sony's electronics division. Here is the product that confluence of events...
Dear Sony,
I have been a loyal customer of yours for the majority of my life. One of my fondest memories involved me working the better part of an adolescent summer break in order to purchase a Sony Cassette Walkman and a pair of "upgraded" Sony headphones.
Throughout the years I have kept tabs on the advancements within your portable electronics line. In my opinion, the pinnacle of performance was the NWZ-X1050/X1060 Series portable music player. However, I regret saying that my youthful enjoyment of your product line is starting to wane with your recent retirement of that series without a suitable replacement in the U.S. market.
You introduced the A840 and A850 series well over a year ago overseas and have yet to bring that device to the United States. The reviews on that series are well regarded for their sound quality and form factor within the audiophile community.
I've always regarded Sony as a pioneer of new technology and refiner of current technology. Your implementation of noise canceling in the X-Series and A-Series was a smart decision. Your controls and UI lately have been regarded as one of the best in the industry - easy to navigate and to the point without lacking the necessary features of a portable media device. Your recent decision to include 64GB of on board memory in one of your A-Series models was brilliant! Features like these put you in a class with the likes of Apple - which is a good place to be in today's market.
Here's where you've fallen short of the mark lately. As of today, the X-Series is sold on your website as a second-rate Refurbished device, making it effectively discontinued. It is only followed up with the S-Series and E-Series (The W-Series is not even worth mentioning). Once you sell through your stock of rehashed X-Series devices your U.S. consumers will be left with two choices, and between the two a maximum of 16GB of storage. 16GB! Come on Sony. There is a huge community of music lovers that demand 64GB of storage, but you have left an entire continent without the opportunity to purchase such a device from you.
Please don't fall into the trap of focusing all of your R&D and marketing efforts on: cellular phones, tablets and mids. There is still enormous demand in the music community for a "high-end" portable music player without all of the bells and whistles of the devices mentioned earlier. Here is my rationale, battery technology has not caught up with the current pace of technology and for that reason a cell phone cannot offer enough talk/listening time to cover a full day's use. Often there are also compromises in form factor or sound quality into order to cram all of the required features of a music device into a phone. Tablets and mids have their rightful place in the consumer electronics market, but will never replace the smaller portable music player due to their size requirements, which are obviously much larger. For the record I am an Android phone user, a netbook owner and I also have the desire to purchase a tablet - but likely in the next 6-12 months when they get through their current growing pains.
In closing, a brilliant portable device would be as follows: 64GB of on board memory, the ability for external storage (please adopt the SD standard), your amazing sound quality (S-Master or something similar), noise canceling, a straight forward UI, micro-USB charge/sync connection, additional support for FLAC, and increased video CODEC support (most notably XviD/AVI). Notice I didn't mention a price point or desire for a touch screen. I don't care much about which tactile interface you adopt, as sound quality, storage capacity and certain minimum features are of the utmost importance to me. I also understand that such a device would come at a cost and although your retail prices are at a premium in the market I have not found the to be unreasonable.
For more information on what the global audiophile community desires in a portable music player please pass along the following web forum to your marketing and/or research departments: www.head-fi.org
I want to remain a loyal Sony consumer, but companies like Cowon, Samsung, Creative, Archos and the like are bringing much more exciting products to the market lately. I hope that future changes in your product line will bring me back into your camp.
Regretfully Yours,
Phil
Edited by SoulSyde - 1/18/11 at 4:00pm
My S639 is the final purchase from their DAP devision,...unless they finally go w/what Soulsyde has asked for in his letter.
