Engad­get is carr­ying an article con­cer­ning the latest SONY flash pla­yers. It’s been a while since a Sony pro­duct has impres­sed me. Howe­ver these look very sleak, small, handy and very use­ful. 1GB with FM tuner, jog dial and 50 hours bat­tery life makes this an iPod shuf­fle bea­ter. Slightly more costly though it seems. I finally see Sony get­ting back on track, their new stance towards their crip­pled music codec is refreshing. Oh and this: three-line orga­nic elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cence dis­plays!!!

Engad­get: “Sony finally bus­ted out all those new flash-based Net­work Walk­man digi­tal audio pla­yers they acci­den­tally (or “acci­den­tally”) lea­ked out last month. First up: their new 400 and 500 series. It’s pretty ine­vi­ta­ble that the 512MB NW-E505 (pic­tu­red above), 1GB NW-E507, 512MB NW-E405, and 1GB NW-E407 are going to get com­pa­red to the iPod shuf­fle, so we’ll just get that out of the way right quick.. All four pla­yers have three-line orga­nic elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cence dis­plays, up to 50 hours of bat­tery life (if you con­nect directly to your PC via USB you can score a quick hit of three hours of play­back time after just three minu­tes of char­ging), jog dial navi­ga­tion, and native sup­port for play­back of MP3 files, as well as ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus, WMA, and WAV. The only real dif­fe­rence bet­ween the 400 and the 500 series is that the NW-E505 and NW-507 have built-in FM tuners. None of these’ll be out for a cou­ple more months, but the NW-E405 will sell for $130, the NW-407 for $180, the NW-E505 for $150, while the NW-E507 rounds things out at $200.”