Gadgets Blog » Handhelds

It’s a bit odd to write about today’s gadget, a device that triggered a cultural revolution around the time I was born. Portable music may have been a 20th-century invention, but the advent of the MP3 and the iPod has spectacularly transformed how we think about music here in the 21st century. The idea of carrying a tape, or even a CD, around just to get our music fix seems archaic. I could listen to my iPod for 31 straight days and not hear the same song twice.

In an era before this technology, Sony’s compact device transformed the world, laying to rest the 8-track cassette and rendering the vinyl record a collector’s item. The Walkman was released in 1979, and as the design became more portable and sleek, sales continued to climb. Sony sold a staggering 220 million cassette tapes around the world in the three decades following its release.

But on Friday of last week, the last Walkman on Japanese soil rolled off the production line, bringing an end to its 30-year run. The advent of compact discs stole a considerable portion of the Walkman’s market share, leading to the updated Discman. According to Sony, there remains a strong market for the Walkman in other places in the world, but Japan’s rapid adoption of other technology has, sadly, rendered the tape deck obsolete.

Today’s top news story also makes for a great way to discuss a nifty gadget: the e-reader. On Monday of this week, Barnes & Noble proudly announced they would be cutting the price of their in-house gadget, the Nook, to the spectacularly low price of $149. It wasn’t available for all editions of the Nook, just those with only WiFi support (as opposed to the more luxurious model which boasts WiFi and 3G coverage). Scarcely hours later, Amazon.com struck back with a price cut of their own, knocking the Kindle down to $189. The result? A price war just before summer reading. But which one to buy?

The Kindle has stood as the favorite in the e-reader arena for some time now. Hitting the market before the Nook, it was one of the first devices to exist solely for the reading of electronic books, and made a sizable impression in the market. Lightweight and portable, with battery life lasting a staggering amount of time, the Kindle offered up a great way to take an electronic library on the go. Factor in how the device was tied to Amazon’s burgeoning online book empire, the availability of texts was an excellent addition to a serious reader’s gadgets.

The Nook, on the other hand, is the challenger in this fight. Barnes & Noble’s gadget offers up some features that improve upon the ideas found in the Kindle, and advantage it gained by being the latter of the two devices to be released onto the market. The Nook features a touch-screen instead of the bulky Kindle keyboard, and also enables the user to “lend” a book to another Nook user for up to two weeks. The better-looking of the two gadgets, the Nook is somewhat troubled by its slower loading speed and shorter battery life.