For all millennials born between 1981 to 1996, the Sony Walkman brand should not be new to you. Between 1987 and 1997, the height of the Walkman’s popularity, the number of people who said they walked for exercise increased by 30% and so did the device.
Two new Sony Walkmans running on Android are out, the NW-A300 (in the above-featured image) and NW-ZX700. Apple may have killed the iPod Touch line recently, but Sony still makes Android-powered Walkmans and has for a while. The first was in 2012 with the Android 2.3 Gingerbread-powered NWZ-Z1000, which looked like Sony just stripped the modem out of an Xperia phone and shoved it onto the market as a music player. Since then, Sony has made designs with more purpose-built hardware, and today there are a whole series of Android-powered Walkman music players out there.
The NW-A300. This basic design debuted in 2019 with the NW-A105, but that shipped with Android 9. This is an upgraded version of that device with a less-ancient version of Android, a new SoC, and a scalloped back design. In Sony’s home of Japan, the 32GB version is $430 (about UGX 1.6 m) before taxes.
The NW-A300 is a tiny little device that measures 56.6×98.5×12 mm, so pretty close to a deck of playing cards. And really, just look at these pictures. Sony might not be the consumer electronics juggernaut it used to be, but it still has an incredible product design department. I have no use for a standalone music player, but both of these Walkmans are so pretty that I just want to hold one.
The front is dominated by a 3.6-inch, 60 Hz, 1280×720 touchscreen LCD. There’s 32GB of storage, and the device supports Wi-Fi 802.11AC and Bluetooth 5. That’s about all Sony wants to talk about for official specs. It touts “longer battery life” but won’t say how big the battery is, promising only “36 hours* of 44.1 KHz FLAC playback, up to 32 hours* of 96 KHz FLAC High-Resolution Audio playback.” Presumably, that’s all with the screen off.
This is a music player, so of course, there’s a headphone jack on the bottom of the unit. You’ll also find a spot for a lanyard, a speedy USB-C 3.2 Gen1 port for quick music transfers, and a MicroSD slot for storing all your music. Buttons along the side of the device also give you every music control you could want, like a hold switch, previous, play/pause, next, volume controls, and power.
The NW-ZX700
There’s another new Sony Walkman, the NW-ZX700. Unlike regular phone equipment, this has a proper audio amplifier with big, beefy capacitors to power the analog audio output. That makes it much bigger than the A300, at 72.6×132 mm and a whopping 17 mm thick. It also has two audio outs: a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack and a 4.4 mm “balanced” audio jack, which is used by some high-end audio equipment. I’m sure Sony has a wonderful headphone collection to match.
The Walkman Blog has the SoC nailed down to a Qualcomm QCS4290. The non-phone Qualcomm model numbers aren’t that familiar, but with an 11 nm chip with eight Kryo 260 CPUs and an Adreno 610 GPU, this is pretty close to a Snapdragon 662 without the modem. The bigger body means the ZX700 has a bigger 5-inch, 1280×720 display, and 64GB of storage. Sony is promising around 23 hours of audio playback, so powering all that amp gear is taking a toll on the battery.
