Walkman Bean
Encyclopedia
The Walkman Bean was a flash memory
-based MP3 player by Sony
. The name refers to its shape, which was modelled after a jellybean, and its ancestor, the original Sony Walkman portable cassette player. The Bean has recently ceased production. http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/16/sony-kills-walkman-bean-after-failure-to-sprout
The player was available in three versions: the basic model with 512MB capacity (model NW-E205), the basic model with an inbuilt FM radio (model NW-E305), and a higher-capacity 1GB model (model NW-E307). It was also available in four colours, named after jellybean flavours - Tropical Ice (blue), Cotton Candy (pink), Licorice (black) and Coconut (white).
The Walkman Bean featured a 'pop-out' USB port for file transfer. One of its major selling points was the battery's fast charge speeds - Sony claims that one can "charge it for 3 minutes to get 3 hours’ playback from it". Sony claimed that a fully charged Bean playing Sony's own compressed audio
format, ATRAC
, can operate for 50 hours, or 40 hours for audio compressed as MP3
. http://www.sony.co.uk/view/ShowArticle.action?article=1123188805574
Flash memory
Flash memory is a non-volatile computer storage chip that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. It was developed from EEPROM and must be erased in fairly large blocks before these can be rewritten with new data...
-based MP3 player by Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
. The name refers to its shape, which was modelled after a jellybean, and its ancestor, the original Sony Walkman portable cassette player. The Bean has recently ceased production. http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/16/sony-kills-walkman-bean-after-failure-to-sprout
The player was available in three versions: the basic model with 512MB capacity (model NW-E205), the basic model with an inbuilt FM radio (model NW-E305), and a higher-capacity 1GB model (model NW-E307). It was also available in four colours, named after jellybean flavours - Tropical Ice (blue), Cotton Candy (pink), Licorice (black) and Coconut (white).
The Walkman Bean featured a 'pop-out' USB port for file transfer. One of its major selling points was the battery's fast charge speeds - Sony claims that one can "charge it for 3 minutes to get 3 hours’ playback from it". Sony claimed that a fully charged Bean playing Sony's own compressed audio
Audio compression
Audio compression may refer to:*Audio compression , a type of lossy compression in which the amount of data in a recorded waveform is reduced for transmission with some loss of quality, used in CD and MP3 encoding, Internet radio, and the like...
format, ATRAC
ATRAC
Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony. MiniDisc was the first commercial product to incorporate ATRAC in 1992. ATRAC allowed a relatively small disc like MiniDisc to have the same running time as CD while storing audio...
, can operate for 50 hours, or 40 hours for audio compressed as MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
. http://www.sony.co.uk/view/ShowArticle.action?article=1123188805574