There's another new Sony Walkman, the NW-ZX700. It's 104,500 yen ($818) in Japan, and while that sounds like a lot for a portable music player, it's actually a relative bargain compared to the "Signature Series" NW-WM1ZM2, which goes for an eye-popping $3,700 thanks to audiophile hocus-pocus like a "gold plated, oxygen-free, copper body."
Anyway, back to this $800 model. Unlike regular phone equipment, this has a proper audio amplifier with big, beefy capacitors to power the analog audio output. That makes it much bigger than the A300, at 72.6×132 mm and a whopping 17 mm thick. It also has two audio outs: a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack and a 4.4 mm "balanced" audio jack, which is used by some high-end audio equipment. I'm sure Sony has a wonderful headphone collection to match.
The Walkman Blog has the SoC nailed down to a Qualcomm QCS4290. The non-phone Qualcomm model numbers aren't that familiar, but with an 11 nm chip with eight Kryo 260 CPUs and an Adreno 610 GPU, this is pretty close to a Snapdragon 662 without the modem. The bigger body means the ZX700 has a bigger 5-inch, 1280×720 display, and 64GB of storage. Sony is promising around 23 hours of audio playback, so powering all that amp gear is taking a toll on the battery.
arstechnica.com
