Sony targets Apple with new Walkman music players

Sony Corp. on Tuesday launched its biggest challenge yet to Apple Computer Inc.'s dominance in the digital music player market with the unveiling of five players and a jukebox software application that ties into an online music store.

The new line-up includes three flash-memory-based models with capacities of 512M bytes, 1G byte and 2G bytes, and two hard-disk drive-based models with capacities of 6G bytes and 20G bytes. They will be available in Japan from October. International launch plans have not yet been set.

Sony created the portable audio category with its Walkman cassette player 22 years ago, but in the digital music player market it has lagged behind Apple and other companies for a few years.

The new players closely mimic Apple's in terms of capacity and the type of storage used -- or at least, they would have had Apple not killed off it's 1-inch hard-disk drive-based iPod mini a few hours prior to Sony's announcement. Apple launched a new flash-memory-based player called the iPod nano in San Francisco on Wednesday. It will replace the iPod mini and be available in 2G-byte and 4G-byte capacities.

Sony is emphasizing the user interface of the new players rather than just the technical specifications. Among the functions on the hard-disk drive-based models is an "artist link." Clicking the link button while a song is playing highlights stored music from similar musicians and genres. There are also several shuffle modes in all the players, including a "time shuffle," which will play all the stored songs from a selected year, and a mode that randomly plays songs from the top-100 most listened-to tracks.

The same artist link function is available in Sony's new jukebox software. Called "Connect Player," the software interface bears more than a passing resemblance to Apple's iTunes software and has many of the same functions. It can also be used to access the Mora online music store established by Sony and many other record companies for the Japanese domestic market.

To promote the service Sony will begin selling prepaid music cards in

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