If you were a child of the eighties or nineties the following scenario may well be familiar to you. You want to go out for a walk or a run but you also want to listen to some tunes on the way. So you load up your trusty generic mobile cassette player (or Walkman as everyone calls it thanks to Sony’s dominance in the area) with a 90 minute mix cassette that you’ve made at home, chuck in a small handful of AA batteries, clip the Walkman to your shorts and off you run.

Now depending on how good the Walkman you’ve bought is the following things may have happened: You run out of power after about fifteen minutes, the walkman chews up your favorite tape, a splash of rain gets on it and it never works again or the weight of the walkman pulls your shorts down right in the middle of the park. I don’t know how we survived these years.

Luckily though mobile music technology has come on leaps and bounds and the boffins at AV equipment giant Sony have just launched a new version of the Walkman, the Sony Walkman NWZ-W260.

The W series of walkmans have been around for a while now but the NWZ-W260 introduces a new sleeker design and a 25% weight reduction compared to previous models. They have packed everything you need in a MP3 player neatly into a pair of headphones, doing away with wires and screens. The Walkman is fully compatible with iTunes, the PlayStation 3, or you can load up tunes by dragging and dropping from your computer and features a 2Gb memory. They also feature ‘Zappin’ song searching, which plays you a little part of each song as you browse for a tune, letting you browse quickly through all of your music. A useful feature for an MP3 player without a screen.

They also claim to be water resistant, this could prove to be very handy if you are caught out in the rain while running, or sweat a lot down the gym, but it’s not recommended you wear them in the shower.

A full charged battery will give you an amazing eight hours of run time, but better than this, if you suddenly need to go out but the Walkman isn’t charged you can quick charge it for only 3 minutes and it’ll give you 60 minutes of run time.

If you are looking for a MP3 player to use when working out down the gym or running this could well be the right choice for you. Extremely lightweight, easy to use and with no wires you could feel like you’re only wearing a pair of headphones. But if you want to carry around a lot of songs, easily connect your MP3 player to a Hi-Fi or other AV equipment or just want the usability that comes from having a screen then this may not be the right choice for you.

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The Sony Walkman makes a return with the NWZ-W260, 10.0 out of 10 based on 2 ratings