Sony's new NW-HD5 touts long battery life

Although Sony's new NW-HD5 "looks suspiciously like one of those Mattel handheld football games that got taken away from you regularly during homeroom in the eighth grade," it has potential to chip away at the iPod's market share, The Motley Fool says. "While it may not be the long-awaited, silver-bullet iPod killer, it could at least eat into the gigantic market share that Apple Computer currently enjoys in that particular -- and particularly profitable -- category." While Apple claims a battery life for its 20-gig iPod models of up to 12 hours, Sony's new device can reportedly keep on keeping on for up to 40 hours. The device will play music files encoded by the user, but when it comes to buying online, it only supports downloads offered by the Connect music store. "Based on its reported battery life alone, the NW whatchamacallit ought to pique the interest of portable music fans everywhere, all the while causing the fat and happy execs over in Apple's iPod division to wring their hipster hands, if only just a little."

Filed under: iPod, industry