Eighteen months after rival Apple Inc. raised the bar in the music player market with its video iPod, Sony Corp. will launch its first digital video Walkman. The NW-A800 series Walkman will initially go on sale in Europe in April. They’ll appear later in other markets but timing hasn’t yet been decided, Sony in Tokyo said Friday. For Europe there are three models: the NW-A805, A806 and A808. The only major difference is in the amount of flash memory, which is 2G bytes, 4G bytes and 8G bytes, respectively.

This is a picture of the new Sony VAIO L series concept PC. It’s supposedly an all-in-one that is supposed to look good, while doing everything you need it to do. The screen is a 15.4″ screen with a nice sleek body to keep it as eye candy. Inside it has a set of 3W speakers to give you good sound quality from an all-in-one. Hardware under the hood, looks like a Core 2 duo T5600, and a 120GB HD with 1GB of DDR2 SDRAM. The look? the jury is out on. I think you need to decide if it’s a desktop or a laptop. The keyboard folds up and that doesn’t look sexy.

New into gaming and with so much to choose with the Sony’s PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii all competing hard for your attention – I’d suggest to still go for the PS2! Sony has cut the PS2’s price to about $130, down from a high of $300, to entice casual gamers, kids and beginners like you!

So the PS2 has a new lease on life and is selling well this late in the game. Chances are that it will out sell it’s latest version the PS3 well into 2008. So makers are beefing up offerings of family-oriented titles, kids’ games, and movie tie-ins to cash-in on this large revenue that casual gamers bring in.

Its raining big players in the game console arena now and it all began a year ago with Microsoft’s Xbox 360. This November came PlayStation 3 from Sony and now the Wii from Nintendo. All ready to capture the holiday season but what do you choose from the three?

Cost-wise the Nintendo Wii is the cheapest buy at $250. The next would be Microsoft’s $399 costing Xbox 360. But the winner with the costliest tag are the two versions of Sony PlayStation 3, a $499 entry-level and $599 higher-end machine.

Sony. Why Sony why? Why in your right mind would you release another Mini-Disc player based off of your proprietary mini-disc format? Do they even sell MDs anymore anywhere? I never see them in the US, but maybe they are still huge in other places. Whatever, here is the scoop on Sony’s latest.

The XM-C17 from JVC will be available in 3 colors- Silver, Blue and Red. Continual playback of approximately 11 hours is possible with 20% charge. The portable MD player has quick charge “function”. The boosting charge time, can be viewed in the liquid crystal display of the player as well as on the remote control. Approximately continual playback of 250 hours (LP4 mode) is possible while using 3 alkaline cells.

I have already written a bit on this comparison before, but that was before the launch of the iPod Video. Now that it is finally out it is much easier to compare the specs between the two to see how they match up.

Video Content

With Sony’s PSP you have a growing collection of UMD movies to purchase, which gives you a great option for portable movie watching. In contrast, with the video iPod you are able to download over 2,000 music videos along with select TV shows at the cost of just $1.99.

It’s no secret that I do not like the memory options available for Sony’s PSP and wish that something better would come along. It seems that “better” has happened with Datel’s 4GB PSP drive.

4GB of storage and an X2 battery combined! That’s right double the storage and double the playing time. But wait there’s even more! Believe it or not, they are even throwing in one of their other ground-breaking products for the PSP - the Get Connected Media Cable and it’s media software.

image via Engadget

So let’s ignore the fact that Apple hasn’t officially announced a video iPod and possibly never will and focus on what will happen if they do decide to go that route. Sony’s PSP was supposed to be the portable media player that took over the world. You never hear about it’s staggering sales or how PSP movies are flying off the shelves, all you seem to hear about on the web is it’s ability to be hacked and customized.