The new Sony Walkman E450 has a formidable rival in the iPod nano. It’s super slim, now has a video recorder and even an FM radio capable of recording tunes. But can it turn off the singing on every single one of your songs, letting you have at the lyrics yourself? No? This can.
Starting from around £70, Sony’s new Sony Walkman E450 (4/8/16GB) comes in at the bottom end of the company’s PMP line up – at least those with screens. It’s a little thicker than the iPod nano, but its 2-inch screen is one of the most pleasant QVGA panels we’ve clapped eyes on, and is deceptively sharp.
The Sony Walkman E450 plays the usual MP3s and AAC files with a quoted 50 hour battery life, but its quirky USP is its prowess as a karaoke machine. If you’ve got the associated .lrc files for your tunes, you can see the lyrics onetime on the screen, but it goes one step further and provides a karaoke mode which actually kills the singing on a track, and even lowers the key so you can hit the high notes.
Sony says it works by dampening the mid-range on a track, and that it should work, at least to some extent with any song. We were shown the feature on a Sony Walkman E450 with a Leona Lewis track, and sure enough, it shut the X Factor crooner up with not much in the way of distortion.
Whether this alone is enough to make you go for a Sony Walkman E450 ahead of an iPod nano is another matter entirely, but have a look for yourself in our hands on photo gallery to help decide. The Sony Walkman E450 is out in September.
Out September | £TBC | Sony
