Personal Music Players
The two hypothetical days illustrate how much new media cultures have become part of our lives. By charting the development of the mobile phone and portable audio players it is clear that technological advances have made both as much a part of 21st century life as television. Over time technology allowed personal media tools such as the mobile to become available to a much wider audience. The first portable personal stereo audio cassette player was invented as early as 1972 but it wasn’t until 1979 that they became universally available when Sony launched its Walkman series. Over the next 30 years the Walkman has changed significantly and is Sony’s latest offering is unrecognisable compared to its great grandfather, the original Walkman TPS-L2.
· 1979: Sony launch their first Walkman, the TPS-L2
· 1984: Walkman Pro goes on sale, it has high quality personal recording capabilities
· 1984: Sony launch the Discman, a CD based system. The name has since been dropped and Sony now market all personal music and video players under the name Walkman
· 1990’s: The cassette based walkman was gradually becoming phased out thanks to emerging digital technology such as the CD and Minidisc
· 2003: Sony launches the Network Walkman which relies on flash memory to hold and store data. Over the years the Walkman has become smaller, cheaper and with improved memory, capable of holding more songs
· 2000’s: iPod becomes the leading portable media player producer, selling 120 million units since 2002.
· Sony mobile phones now come with music players as standard. In response, apple release the iPhone or iPod touch
The Rise and Rise of the Apple iPod
· 2001: Apple unveils iPod. The first model comes with a 5 GB hard drive and will put ‘1000 songs in your pocket’
· 2002: The famous touch sensitive technology becomes available and the capacity is increased to up to 20 GB
· 2003: iPod classic memory now boosted to 60 GB which equates to over 10,000 tracks
· 2004: First colour iPod mini. Click wheel used now by mini and classic. Picture viewing now possible on the iPod classic
· 2005: iPod introduce the nano as a direct replacement for the mini. The nano is significantly smaller and has the capability to store photographs. The iPod shuffle is a cheaper offering from apple. There is no screen and its major selling point is that you don’t know in which order the songs will be plated
· 2006: Apple focus on boosting the memory of their players and improving the Nano and the shuffle
· 2007: Third generation nano has new design, improved memory and video capability. The sixth generation iPod classic now has 160 GB memory, the same as most computers and can store 40, 000 songs. The end of the year saw the launch of the iPhone which was seen primarily as a mobile phone rather than a music player but is a multimedia tool. The iPhone has visual voice messaging, text messaging, email, a camera, video camera and extensive internet access.
