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Sony’s radio destroyer?

Posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 11:17am. #

This interesting gadget popped up in my inbox yesterday. It’s a £29 ($55) radio transmitter, that you can plug into any of the Sony Ericsson music phones, which then broadcasts a signal to your nearest radio.

Note how it describes it. “Tune the stereo in to your personal station”.

This Sony device is guaranteed to play you the music you like, but that’s all. No discovery, no new tracks, no news, travel, weather. Nothing to talk about with your friends, nothing to learn. (Until you add podcasts, of course.) It’s not my own personal station, really. It’s just my own music.

Clearly there’s a massive difference between, say, the output of this Sony device and, say, the output of Radio 1 or Capital 95.8. But there’s much less of a difference between the output of this and more non-stop music stations, like The Arrow, Chill, or Virgin Radio Xtreme.

I can’t decide whether this is another small nail in music radio’s coffin - more listening to my own music, less to the radio - or, something which will get people at least understanding how to switch their radio on, followed by them actually using their radio for music because it’s quicker, simpler, less hassle, and doesn’t make your phone look ugly.

Your comments are welcome.

5 comments

Jason Cartwright said at January 5th, 2008 at 11:28am

I bought one of these transmitters (it looks like soap on a rope) from the states before they were *cough* legal in the UK. Works a treat with my iPod in the car, but it doesn’t replace Radio 1 if there is a good show on.

martin said at January 5th, 2008 at 3:08pm

Um, it’s like an iTrip. For my mobile phone. Which I don’t use for music anyway, because I’ve got an iPod for that.

The only difference I can see between this and an iTrip is that it’s got the halo effect of being Walkman branded, if that even means anything these days.

Bruce said at January 5th, 2008 at 7:26pm

To be honest, this is no different to an iTrip. More interesting for me is the fact that the iPod has spawned these new innovations for years - I bought my first iTrip three years ago - BUT radio seems to have a Soviet pace of innovation. Pure (the makers of the Evoke-1) are only just now launching their clever little equivalent device for DAB.

Of course I think the Pure in car DAB is great - but is there enough fresh thinking in the radio industry to come up with these things? The industry has been hung up on in car DAB being an important stepping stone but there has been a lazy approach to solving it. The geek community (and I use that term fondly) fixed the problem for iPods in a trice.

William T said at January 5th, 2008 at 8:23pm

I’m sure it really adds to the whole radio experience that you have to position the phone close enough to the radio to make it go ‘brrr-brrr-br-br-br-brrr’ every 15 minutes when it communicates with the base station…

Amir Kiani said at January 7th, 2008 at 10:57am

This Sony device is guaranteed to play you the music you like, but that’s all. No discovery, no new tracks, no news, travel, weather. Nothing to talk about with your friends, nothing to learn. (Until you add podcasts, of course.) It’s not my own personal station, really. It’s just my own music.
Its one of the my favorite handset have lots of……………….

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