SPORTY PLAY: The new Sports Walkman launched by Sony in India this week. (Inset) The Walkman strapped on to the arm.

BANGALORE: The latest avatar of the Walkman is true to its name, in a way never intended by Sony when it first launched the iconic music player over a quarter century ago. The new Sports Walkman — the NW-S200 series — launched in India this week, is the smallest model yet from its Japanese makers.

Weighing just over 25 grams, it is the size of a chubby forefinger. Within this tiny frame, it packs not just an FM radio and enough storage for between 250 and 500 songs (depending on the model), but a special gravity sensor. This keeps tabs on you as walk or run, with the Walkman strapped to your arm (an arm band is provided), counting how many steps you take, in how much time.

If you feed in your age, weight and height, it will use this information to tell you how many calories you have burnt as you jog.

And if you set a limit, the electronics will sense when you have reached it and shut off the music, to tell you it is time to call its quits for the day. Hardcore runners and athletes can also use the Sports Walkman to set an exercise regime — or just as a stopwatch to time their sprints.

The Hindu was enabled to evaluate the NW-S200 Sports Walkman and found that the product seems optimised for use `on the run:' most functions are controlled by rotating a cylindrical barrel and the scrolling display of music titles or data uses the latest high intensity Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) technology, for easy reading even in bright sunlight.

There are no batteries to change inside the player: it is too small for that. You charge its power source by unscrewing a Universal Serial Bus (USB) plug and connecting it by a cable to a PC or laptop. The makers say a full charge will keep the Walkman going for about 18 hours. But for those in a hurry, a three-minute charging cycle gives around three hours of playtime. The same USB connection also doubles as the umbilical to download music from the computer's hard disk or directly from its CD/DVD drive.

Another neat trick we found, was the Walkman's ability to sense whether you are walking or jogging and switch automatically from the more sedate titles in your play list to the faster beats.

The sound quality through the clip-on earphones is good enough even in a fairly noisy outdoor environment, thanks to a 5-band equaliser (Other Walkman models, but not this one, have positive noise reduction technology)

The Walkman comes to India in two versions, the NW-S203F, which has one gigabyte of storage, enough for about 250 songs (Rs. 8,990) and the NW-S205F that sports 2 GB — good for over 500 songs (Rs. 10,990).

A quick check on the Web shows, that these prices are roughly equivalent to the sterling selling prices in the U.K., the other region where these two models have been launched in recent weeks. So, there is not much reason to shop abroad for the Sports Walkman.

From the first cassette-based Walkman of the early 1980s, to the bulky CD version of the 1990s and the latest models based on the highly compact Flash memory, Sony's music player and its clones have been embraced by the health conscious and the athletically inclined, as the inseparable companion to productive jogging.

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