The Demise of the WALKMAN Bean
Sony announced this week that the cute bean-shaped WALKMAN will be discontinued effectively in April 2006. Oliver Duff reports that after less than six months on the market, Sony’s Walkman Bean is to be discontinued - a victim of the digital revolution and the fashion for ruthlessly upgrading. Duff is indeed correct.
During its debut, the WALKMAN Bean was marketed by Sony as part of its “gadgets for girls” campaign. Despite its short lifecycle, this cute little device has adorned models as they struts the fashion runway. In fact, the WALKMAN Bean was only recently used by Luella Bartley to accessorize her Fall/Winter 2006 collection.Â
Â
“I’m motivated by a new sense of dressing up in London with clubs full of beautiful girls in forties-inspired outfits,” Bartley said. “The new, modern form of burlesque, the tattooed women of the forties and of course slow, feminine, sexy, music perfect to listen to on a Walkman device.”
Also at the show, the Luella for Walkman “Gadgets for Girls” Lounge offered guests the opportunity to get a close up of the specially designed phones and music players. “My life has a soundtrack,” Bartley noted. “And it’s usually playing back on a Walkman.”
Â
Â
Did anyone actually buy this?? I mean I only know of one person who had one of these, and havent seen them in stores that much.
Yes, I do have the blue unit. Like the PSP, the WALKMAN Bean supports the full range of ATRAC3plus bit rates.
Does it support all Atrac bitrates? I suppose that’s one more reason to believe there’s no justification for the lack of support in other Walkmans. After all, they didn’t come much earlier than the Beans.
Yes, including both the ATRAC3plus 320kbps and 352kbps.
Yes, I have one black color BEAN, around 1GB capacity. It is nice and support without Sonic Stage for MP3 with MP3 file manager.
My mom actually got one. I’ve also seen a few floating around campus. I’m not a big fan because they feel a little flimsy in construction. The hold switch is too easy to push to the point where the USB will pop out. I bet this has everything to do with the reordering of Sony and their product lines.
Can’t say i’m surprised to these go. It seemed a little odd to me that they ran alongside the E-series flash player, which to me seemd much better.
However i do think that sony’s Walkman products seem to have too short a life. If they would stop changing so often the market may have a chance to become fond of their products, rather than them being here one day and gone the next.
I agree with richard_p, Sony had too many E100/200/300/400/500 & A600 series flash players in various markets at once and some had to go. To bring out a product like this & drop in so short a time is a big kick in the guts to those who bought one; Sony should think seriously about giving those who registered their Bean a replacement product if they have so little faith in it.
These short life orphan products must be eroding confidence in Sony as buyers think they are conned into being used as prototype testers.
Atleast there seems to be a progression from E400/E500s to the newer A600s.
Do you see that model there? Check out that hair– I wouldn’t buy a Bean walkman
A “bean” hairdo to match her Bean WALKMAN.
I’m not surprised the Bean is being discontinued. I worked at a Sony store for a while and I picked up one of these and it’s not very sturdy at all. The door to the USB jack is very flimsy. I, myself, broke it, some kid playing with it broke it, and even another salesperson broke it. Although easily fixed, that’s not a very good thing to happen to an MP3 player that had a good thing going (the pop out USB jack). I’m surprised Sony even would come out with something so flimsy in design. I would never buy one of these.
This only motivates me to return my NEWLY purchased black 1gb bean back to the store and get an E507
no wonder so many people selling the 1Gb Sony bean at cheap price RM359 - RM369…
:0