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The Sony Walkman NW-A300. It’s a shame that Sony never became a strong player in the smartphone space because wow, their product designs are still so good.
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Yes, that’s regular Android.
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The bottom. From left to right we have a headphone jack, lanyard hole, USB-C port and a microSD slot.
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Music buttons! So many music buttons!
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The back has this nice scallop texture.
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The frame is made of aluminum.
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It comes in colors. That gray really hits me in the nostalgic Sony sweet spot.
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There are small folio cases! They are so cute.
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The folio case makes it stand upright!
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Sony has released a pair of new Android Walkmans, the NW-A300 and NW-ZX700. Yes that’s right, Walkmans, Sony’s legendary music player brand from the 1980s. Apple may have given up on the idea of a music player alongside a smartphone when it recently killed off the iPod Touch line, but Sony still makes Android-powered Walkmans and has been doing so for a while. The first was in 2012 with the Android 2.3 Gingerbread-powered NWZ-Z1000, which looked like Sony had just stripped the modem out of an Xperia phone and pushed it onto the market as a music player. Since then, Sony has been designing with more purpose-built hardware, and today there’s a slew of Android-powered Walkman music players. Sadly, these new ones only appear to be on sale in Japan, the UK and Europe for now.
We’ll start with the more user-friendly of the two, the NW-A300. This basic design debuted in 2019 with the NW-A105, but shipped with Android 9. This is an upgraded version of that device with a less old version of Android, a new SoC and a scalloped back design. In Japan, home of Sony, the 32 GB version costs 46,000 yen (about $360), while in Europe it costs 399 euros (about $430).
The NW-A300 is a small device measuring 56.6 x 98.5 x 12mm, so pretty close to a deck of playing cards. And really, just Look with these photos. Sony may not be the consumer electronics juggernaut it used to be, but it still has an incredible product design department. I don’t need a standalone music player, but both Walkmans are so nice I just want to hold one.
The front is dominated by a 3.6-inch, 60 Hz, 1280 × 720 touchscreen LCD. There’s 32GB of storage and the device supports Wi-Fi 802.11AC and Bluetooth 5. That’s about all Sony wants to talk about for official specs. It touts “longer battery life,” but doesn’t say how big the battery is, promising only “36 hours * 44.1 KHz FLAC playback, up to 32 hours * 96 KHz FLAC High-Resolution Audio playback.” Presumably that’s all with the screen off.
For more specs, we can visit The Walkman Blog, a wonderful site that takes these little music players very seriously. In October, the site found documentation for the A300 with a 1500 mAh battery. The system-on-a-chip in the older NW-A100 model was the NXP i.MX8M-Mini, a wildly slow 28nm SoC that has just four Arm Cortex-A53 CPUs and 4GB of RAM. You can say, “This is just a music player,” but that’s not really true since it still runs full Android with an app store and all. Geekbench scores show this has a new quad-core Qualcomm chip with 4GB of RAM, but we can’t be sure of the model number. A newer chip with smaller transistors would probably promise much of that “better battery life.”
This is a music player, so of course there’s a headphone jack on the bottom of the device. You’ll also find a place for a lanyard, a fast USB-C 3.2 Gen1 port for fast music transfers and a MicroSD slot for storing all your music. Buttons on the side of the unit also give you all the music controls you could want, such as a hold switch, previous, play/pause, next, volume controls and on/off.
