Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's roundup of the most interesting toys we’ve seen this week. It’s a Guardians of the Galaxy blowout as we’ve got life-sized Groots, creepy plush Groots, and a fancy cassette player. But wait—there’s more, including a very swanky David Bowie figure and a very large Iron Man. Check it out!
People in prison are so damn resourceful that they can turn a pen, a Walkman, a couple of paper clips, a few rubber bands, and a set of batteries into a fully functional tattoo gun. The motor, battery pack, and switch come from a Walkman that’s torn apart, the ink obviously comes from the pen, the needle is made from…
The '80s were arguably one of the greatest decades in history to be a kid with an allowance burning a hole in your pocket, and a free afternoon to spend at a toy store. And decades later, toy companies have realized that all those kids buying the wonderful toys from the '80s are all grown up now with plenty of…
Hello, friends. Welcome to BitStream, a new roundup of awesome news fit for the TL;DR format. It's a bum rush of information to your brain. Daily.
Sony's showing off a new sports and training headset prototype that's basically the waterproof, head-mounted Walkman the company's been trying to sell for a few years crammed with a heartrate monitor, GPS radio, and an accelerometer for counting your steps.
Last fall, the Sony Walkman sprung from the ashes of the 90s, reborn as a hi-def audio phoenix with lots of lossless codec support and a $300 price tag. Today, the Walkman returns once again. This time it costs about as much as a used '89 Cadillac Eldorado.
All types of different gadgets enter and leave our lives. Some stay for years and are cherished well past their prime. Others we lose, whether sold off in our youthful ignorance or lost in some other equally tragic way.
Today, Sony is expanding its high-resolution audio push with a no-frills Walkman. The slight little music player weighs just 2.3 ounces, making Neil Young's chunky Pono player look like a brick. High-resolution audio might be a little suspect, but there's no doubt this petite music player is a beauty.
Sony first called it the Stowaway in the UK, the Freestyle in Australia, and the Soundabout in the U.S. — but eventually it would become known everywhere as the Walkman.
The Walkman turns 35 today. If you own one still, it is probably dusty, and maybe moldy, and definitely gross and old. But for a while, a Walkman was the thing. Especially in my house.
Originally marketed in 1979, the first Sony Walkman turns 35 this year, and it's about as outmoded as a technology can be these days. That's why it's understandable that the kids in this delightful video, none of whom were alive in the 90s, have no idea how to use the thing. Or what it's for. They can't even conceive…
Here's a fantastic short for you sci-fi fans: Record/Play, directed by Jesse Atlas, is a short film that covers time travel, love, changing fate, war, memories and cassette tapes. It's slow building yet tense, you're itching to see what new wrinkles each play of the tape will bring.
In its quest to keep the legendary Walkman brand relevant in the post-iPod world, Sony has taken to creating some odd and neat, if niche gadgets, like the one-piece waterproof Walkman. Now, here's another stab at the same concept retooled for the hip commuter crowd.
If workouts take you from pounding the pavement to plunging into the pool with little time to spare between, Sony's new one-piece Walkman might be of some interest to you.
In the 1920s, the world was still about 60 years away from the first Walkman, and about 80 from the iPod, but portable music was still apparently a thing. All you had to do was rig a little radio to your garter and a speaker around your head, as the 20s lady in the above video demonstrates.
It's the end of an era. Or more accurately, it's effectively been the end of an era for a while and this is another part of it. In early 2013, Sony will stop producing its three remaining models of handheld cassette recorders, meaning first the Walkman and now its cousins are on their final march to death.
A Walkman's not just for music anymore. The forthcoming Sony Android Walkman will give people access to apps—finally!—but true to the Walkman's legacy Sony's built the new version around it's music features.
Walkmans (Walkmen?) will never die! Remember that old, yellow, tape-filled piece of crap that weighed your pants down? Well Sony just birthed that thing's great-grandson. It's an Android 2.3 phone aimed music lovers.
Do you remember Sony? Not the guys who let your PSN account get hacked, or the ones who loved their proprietary formats more than their customers. The Sony you grew up with, who made the gear you couldn't live without. I hope you do. Because it looks like they might just be back.
Using your phone as your mp3 player while you work out sucks. It gets sweaty and gross and you have to carry it around the rest of the day smelling like your armpit. No thanks. Give me a sweat-proof one like the new Sports Walkman.
