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.

The screen is a 2-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) panel with QVGA resolution (240 pixels by 320 pixels). It’s orientated in portrait form rather than the landscape form used on the iPod, but videos can be viewed with the device either held vertically or horizontally, said Sony. Audio playback in a number of flavors of Sony’s ATRAC compression is possible, and Sony supplies software for converting Windows Media Audio, MP3 and WAV files to ATRAC. It’s also possible to directly load MP3 files onto the Walkman, but battery life will be shorter. For video the Walkman plays back MPEG4 H.264/AVC encoded files. The NW-A805 is listed on Sony’s online store for €180 (US$237)