Kid Trades His iPod for a Walkman, Reviews It

Posted by | 06/29/2009 | 5 Comments

_45984325_scott_466.jpgI still remember yearning for a walkman, saving my allowance up for months and then carrying my first personal media player just about everywhere I went. Of course that was in the early 80′s, before the advent of the iPod. A 13-year old swapped his iPod Touch for a Walkman and reviewed it over at the BBC.

Scott Campbell wrote:

When I saw it for the first time, its colour also struck me. Nowadays gadgets come in a rainbow of colours but this was only one shade – a bland grey…Personally, I’m relieved I live in the digital age, with bigger choice, more functions and smaller devices. I’m relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can’t imagine having to use such basic equipment every day.

Read the full review to see how Scott was dumbfounded by the concept of double-sided tapes and the “normal/metal” switch.

Category: Editorials

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Xavier Lanier is the publisher of Gotta Be Moible and Notebooks.com. He's a mobile technology geek that uses an iPhone 4S, iPad 2, Galaxy Nexus and Kindle Fire on a daily basis. He's an expert photographer that shoots primarily with Nikon DSLRs. You can follow Xavier on Twitter @xavierlanier and Google+
  • http://sumocat.blogspot.com Sumocat

    This kid really stretched on the Walkman advantages. My old Walkman only had one headphone port and didn’t come with an AC adapter, but it wasn’t a big gray brick either.

  • SAM

    I had one of those. I could listen to my music without
    disturbing/annoying others at work.

    It had a grey vinyl leather-like snap case,
    because you had to open it to flip over the cassette tape.

    I think it ran from 6 AA batteries.
    It came with foam covered metal earphones…great for lightning storms.

    I was lucky and purchased a record player(a thing to decode those funny round black discs) that had a radio AND cassette redorder/player.

    They talk about downloading MP3s nowadays,
    we had to “aquire” our music the old fashioned way,
    record it onto cassette tape from the radio…

  • CLC

    I don’t remember when the Walkman came out. (I was born in 1985.) But I do remember all the trials and tribulations of using cassettes. LOL. I also remember the record players since my mother’s favorite music came on those. I remember when it switched over to CD’s… I didn’t like the CD, at first, because they skipped so badly when you even took a step! Also, though the ability to skip past whole songs with one click was nice, the lack of a fast forward in the early CD players was annoying when listening to audio books.

    I am nostalgic about the days of cassettes; but I’m glad to have my MP3 players.

  • CLC

    @Sumocat

    My cassette players didn’t have two headphone jacks or an AC adapter either.

  • remo26

    It’s funny to realize that some of the terms that we use to describe the technology date the experience, and yet really aren’t so different from today’s technology.

    The one that struck me was “recording from the radio to cassette” as opposed to “downloading.” These really are the same process, except in the case of the old tech the recording medium has a slower linear recording mechanism, the recording selection is determined by the sender (radio station) instead of the receiver (user), and transmission quality is determined by the radio broadcast signal.

    This exemplefies how form followed function. Except for copyright laws and the economics of the music industry, there’s no reason why there couldn’t have been radio stations that played music for “downloading” with some kind of remuneration scheme, but this was not the purpose of radio at the time. If you consider satellite radio today, with the endless number of specialty programming, the two approaches have merged to a large extent.

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