Spilling The Beans With Sony

When thinking of a bean, the first thing that comes to my mind is a vegetable and the kidney beans I’d see in a nice hot bowl of Zippy’s chili. But it’s actually Sony that’s making beans nowadays. . .the new Walkman Bean that is.

The Bean was one of the items featured at the recent Sony Expo held at the Ala Moana Hotel. (Also shown at the expo was the BRAVIA television series I recently wrote about.) Sony is working on expanding its line of Walkman digital music players, probably to compete with Apple’s stronghold on the digital music player market with their iPods. However, Sony’s new series of flash-based devices are a feast for the ears as well as the eyes.

The bright, colorful and compact Bean comes in coconut white and tropical ice blue for the 512 MB EW-E305 model, and the 1 GB NW-307 version comes in black licorice and cotton candy pink especially for the girls. To completely match with the fun colors, all the Beans come with appropriate color-coordinated earbuds. The Bean includes a bright one-line organic electroluminescence (OEL) display, a five-way D pad controller with three buttons. The OEL’s bright display makes it easy to view track and title information and you can also view the time and date with the time/calendar function.

A key advantage the Bean has over any iPod is the fact that it has an FM tuner, so you can listen to the radio as well. Unfortunately you cannot record any radio, but you can manually or automatically program up to 30 presets total. It plays MP3 and ATRAC3/3plus (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding - Sony’s proprietary music coding) music files, and also supports WMA and WAV formats. It is compatible with Sony’s Connect online music store and includes SonicStage software for music management.

Hence its name, the Bean is literally shaped like a bean, mostly resembling a kidney bean with its rounded edges with a slight bend in the middle. Although a neat little shape, I understand it’s a small challenge to operate and handle. A convenient pop-up USB jack is built-into the Bean to allow you to plug right into your computer. A full battery charge provides up to 50 hours of continuous playback, and a quick 45-minute charge gives you an 80% charge. If you’re really in a rush, a quick three-minute charge, gives you three hours of listening time.

To get your own Walkman Bean, the 512 MB NW-E305 model costs about $130 and the 1GB NW-E307 model is about $180 at www.sony.com or at Shirokiya.