19 Jul 10 Sony’s E450 series encourages you to sing along

Karaoke is huge in Japan. The term originates from there of course, and is a combination of two words meaning "open orchestra". There are hundreds of venues around Tokyo dedicated to the entertaining, often embarrassing endeavor of singing along to your favorite pop singer. For those that can't make it out to these "Karaoke boxes", as they're called, Sony has a portable solution for you. The new NWZ-E450 Walkman series has a new Karaoke mode that reduces the vocal track on songs. This is accompanied with a new scrolling lyrics feature called "Lyrics Sync" that supports standard .lrc files.

The rest of the specs are about what you'd expect from a Sony Walkman. It has a 2.0" display, capacities ranging from 4 to 16GB's, support for MP3, WMA, AAC, WMV, H.264, and MPEG-4, and has an FM tuner and voice recorder. It also gets an estimated 50 hours of audio playback on a single charge. So really, the only thing truly different about this is the Karaoke mode, which sounds rather gimmicky to me. I think a lot people actually enjoy singing with their favorite artists, not instead of them.

My suggestion for Sony is to release a portable version of their popular Singstar games on the player. Singstar uses a points-based system to evaluate how close you've come to the actual song. I think that would be far more rewarding than a standard Karaoke feature. Additionally, Sony could actually make revenue from selling song packs for the game. But I guess all of this makes too much sense, so we'll never see it happen. The E450 series comes out next month, with no official pricing info released thus far.

via Pocket-Lint