AV Watch has done a review of the new Z-Series which is available for purchase in Japan. You can find the translated version of the post from AV Watch here. It appears that the new Z ships with NC headphones (MDR-NWNC33) and a WM-post to USB cable for transfers. The 4.3 inch screen has a resolution of 480x800 which is said to offer a good viewing experience. Supported video formats are MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (.Mp4, .M4v), MPEG-4 (. Mp4,. M4v) and WMV. The new Z does feature a micro HDMI port which is handy when connecting to a TV but it appears that AV Watch had some issues with this.
Applications from the Android market will work with no problems and with a NVIDIA Tegra 2 1GHz CPU and memory at 512MB, the new Z should have no issues with Tegra games.
The new Z is more expensive than the equivalent Ipod touch but it does feature a larger screen, faster cpu, noise cancellation and of course Android instead of iOS. The main competition may actually come from Sony itself, the PlayStation Vita with its gorgeous 5-inch 16:9 OLED display with a resolution of 960 x 544.
So should one wait for the new Z-Series to hit your local area? At this moment it is not looking too enticing for me personally, since my X-Series provides me with plenty of storage and noise cancellation and I have my phone for everything else. And if you like playing games on a mobile device, I would definitely wait for the PlayStation Vita.
It surprises me that all of these new walkman's appear to be available elsewhere, yet we have access to Music Unlimited in Australia. Would make more sense to me to market the new range and the music service together. But hey, what would I know, I'm just a consumer...
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