There are few words more evocative of those who lived through the 1980s than the Walkman, right? Although the name primarily corresponds to the legendary Sony TPS-L2, over the years it became a generic name used by the youth of the day to refer to portable cassette players. The days when tapes, whether they were official artists, compilations of various kinds or radio recordings, took up a lot of space in the backpack. Oh, how young we were.

Sorry for the digression, but you can trust me when I say that this is exactly what Sony is appealing to Walkman NW-A306a device that has just been announced by the Japanese technology company, a digital audio player (another piece that is also becoming an object of nostalgia) that combines what a device of this type can offer in this decade with a design that, in a way, is supposed to resemble the brand’s classic players .

So on the front, where we saw the movement of the tape reel in the models of the eighties, this Walkman NW-A306 has a 3.6-inch TFT touch screen with a resolution of 720p (1280 x 720 pixels) and on the side where the buttons to control the device are found physical buttons again, though much smaller than the ones back then. We have since replaced the batteries, yes, with a battery capable of providing up to 26 hours of playback through apps and up to 36 hours of 44.1kHz FLAC playback.

The music player is true to its role as users can only download music and subscription-based music streaming apps like YouTube and Spotify, although it comes with Android 12, it seems Sony doesn’t want this Walkman NW -A306 to end up as it is used as an e-mail reader, calculator, playing games, etc. We can interpret this as an unnecessary limitation or as a suggestion to not be distracted by unnecessary details while listening to music, it is up to the consumer.

As for the storage capacity, it has an internal memory of 32 gigabytes, but in the technical specifications, Sonya already tells us that we can actually only have 18, which luckily we can expand with a MicroSD memory card. It has WiFi connectivity (802.11 A/B/G/N) and Bluetooth 5.0, to which we must add a USB C port and, of course, a minijack.

Does such a device make sense? Before you answer, you should know that it will be priced at $375, although Sony focuses on the sound quality it provides. In my opinion, it only makes sense if this Walkman NW-A306 provides sound quality far beyond what smartphones offer. Or, of course, if you’re one of those people who find solace in nostalgia and who want to leave the house with a Walkman again. Of course without tapes and without those crazy headphones we used in the eighties.

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