If the Sony Walkman NW-ZX1 is your type of thing but you can’t afford the $760 price tag, know that you’re not alone and that Sony is aware of this. Thats why for the common folks, Sony has announced the Walkman NW-F880 which packs the same 4-inch Triluminos display with 480 x 854 pixels and runs on Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean, giving you access to thousands of apps. Like its bigger brother, the Walkman NW-F880 also offers S-Master HX digital amplifier, DSEE (Digital Sound Enhancement Engine) HX technology, Clear Audio+, all designed to give you a better audio experience with the many file formats that it supports. Those include:

• FLAC
• WAV
• AIFF
• Apple Lossless
• MP3
• WMA
• ACC
• HE-ACC
• ATRAC

If wired headphones are not your thing, the new Walkman NW-F880 also includes built in NFC for easy pairing to NFC enabled headphones and even easier streaming to NFC enabled home theater units. The new Walkman will come in a Black, White, Blue and Vivid Pink and thus misses the metal chassis from the ZX1, instead opting for a plastic shell to accommodate the color choices.

The F880 is set to run on a dual core 1.0 GHz OMAP4 Cortex-A9 chip with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and a built in FM transmitter which the ZX1 does not include. The NW-F880 will come in a three sizes which include  (NW-F885 – 16GB, W-F886 – 32GB and NW-F887 – 64GB) and are priced at $274, $304, and $405 respectively with an October 19th release date for Japan.

Discuss:

What features matter to you in a MP3 player?