The Walkman Is Back — and Totally Wireless and Waterproof
Remember the good ol’ days of the Sports Walkman?
Oh, it seems as though it was yesterday. Until, that is, you realize that your current iPod Shuffle is about 400 times better when working out.
But, it seems as though the Walkman is making a comeback — and in the best way possible. Two words: wireless and waterproof.
A bunch more words: this is basically like your iPod Shuffle except that it doesn’t clip to your shirt and can go in the pool or in the rain. Holding 4 GBs of music (that’s 900 songs) from a variety of formats on your computer, the Walkman Sports MP3 Player can go as deep as six feet underwater (no salt water though) and can play for up to eight hours when it’s fully charged. And when it’s not charged and you need to work out now? You can plug it in for three minutes, and it’ll get you through a 60-minute workout.
Seriously. How life-changing is that?
Sony was really smart about everything with this Walkman really. When you open the package, instead of going through a bunch of instructions, you’re prompted to watch a four-minute video that pretty much breaks everything down from how to use your Walkman to how to position it to what to do if water does happen to get into your earbuds. The only thing it doesn’t show how to do is charge the device and drop your music on it, but there are written directions for that and it’s really pretty self-explanatory. From opening the package to jamming to music, the whole process took me 15 minutes, tops — and that included that three-minute charge time. Pretty epic.
And I know we here on FBG are picky about our earbuds. We’re notorious for having oddly shaped heads and ears. But the Walkman Sports MP3 Player fit pretty nicely. It took a little playing with to get the back bands set up just right, along with the position of the earbuds (you can customize the size, which is nice), but once I got it, they were in. I could actually feel the watertight seal. I haven’t tried them in the pool yet (that still kind of scares me a bit, I’ll admit!), but they worked great during a quick jog in the rain, and it sure was nice to not worry about them getting wet. After about 15 minutes of wear, they did start to bother my ears a bit, but it was more in the uncomfortable way than a painful way. I imagine that with a little more tweaking of the fit and getting used to them they’ll start to feel more normal with more use.
I really liked the controls though — turning the device on and off is easy. There’s a lock button, and even if you don’t memorize what buttons do what, a cue actually will tell you (with a beep or with an actual “shuffle” prompt) in your earbuds as you push them. You can shuffle, pause, play or change your playlist. Again, it takes some practice, but it’s cool stuff. And the sound is great. Really.
In four fun colors, these go for about $80, which seems like a really great deal to me. The wave of the Walkman future is here … I wonder what they’ll come up with next? ‘Cause if you told me 20 years ago that the yellow Walkman above wasn’t always going to be the coolest thing ever, I’m pretty sure I’d have called you a liar — and then jammed out to my Paula Abdul.
Are you a Walkman owner, past or present? Which kind did/do you have? —Jenn