The Register echoes our skepticism about Sony’s announcement that they’re planning a $60 MP3 player to compete with the iPod:
Sony hasn’t said that its $60 music player will feature a high capacity hard drive as the iPod does – or is as compact as the Apple machine. Hard drive prices are falling, it’s true, but ultra-compact, high capacity models are still pretty expensive, and eat up much of the cost of manufacturing a hard drive-based music player. We’ve no doubt that Sony will offer such a device of its own, but the $60 model isn’t it. That’s less than half the price of a typical 128MB solid-state MP3 player, for heaven’s sake.
What Sony is probably planning is some sort of barebones player that can have a hard drive attached to it or something like that.
