Sony Walkman E450 Is Full Of Features Including Lyric Sync And Karaoke Mode

Sony Europe is showing off the latest revision to the Walkman E series (hands-on at engadget), which has always been a budget friendly, yet above average MP3/Video player in the broad landscape of personal media devices. The 2010 version of the E series, due in August, has five assorted color options such as Black, Red, Blue, Pink, Green and new features we’ve never seen before in a Walkman outside of Japan.

This Walkman is rather small, like its predecessors, and has a 2 inch QVGA LCD screen along with other functions such as Dynamic Normalizer, VPT, Equalizer, FM Radio, voice recorder, Alarm/timer and WM-Port. Battery life is 50 hours of music playback with MP3 files at 128kbps with the equalizer set to “None”, and 10 hours of video playback with MPEG-4 files at 384kbps.

Sony has integrated Lyrics Sync to this music player, which supports the standardized .lrc file format, which displays lyrics for the current song on the screen while it plays. To further enhance this capability, Sony also added Karaoke Mode, which dynamically reduces the volume of the singer’s voice so you can hear your own voice clearly over the song. There’s even a playback key that can be adjusted up or down to match your vocal reach without affecting playback speed. Nice!

Another important update is the change of the excellent Walkman interface, which has remained relatively the same in their portable music players for several generations. Things are somewhat different now with the interface; the new playback screen displays a large bold view of the cover artwork for the current song. Menus are a little more streamlined and have recieved cosmetic updates around the menu for a more enhanced appearance. You can briefly see the new interface in the engadget link above.

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SensMe technology is also included, which is actually quite useful for those of you who want music to suite your mood. Often when working out I wish my iPhone could categorize my fast-paced songs together. SensMe, found exclusively in certain Sony products, “automatically analyses and categorizes your music library, creating a series of themed channels. Just pick your channel to suit the moment, from mellow to upbeat.” You can also create playlists on the fly with the helpful Bookmark function.

Sony also noted that this “WALKMAN now works better than ever with your PC if you’re running Windows 7. Connect the WALKMAN E450 to your PC’s USB port and a new ‘Device Stage’ window launches automatically. This easy-to-use media management function lets you browse files stored on WALKMAN in Windows Explorer and export media files directly to WALKMAN from your PC. Windows 7 even takes care of converting DivX and AVCHD video files stored on your hard drive to playable format for viewing on WALKMAN.”

The latest NWZ-E450 series include 4GB (NWZ-E453), 8GB (NWZ-E454) and 16GB (NWZ-E455) capacities to accommodate most on-the-go music collections.