In a move to help fight off the dominance of Apple’s iPod MP3 Player, Sony today announced a hard drive based Walkman, reports Reuters.

The Walkman will debut in Britain for 249 pounds before Christmas, and in Europe in 2005 for 369 Euros.

This is Sony’s second entry into the MP3 Walkman market, with its first product only providing support for Atrac compressed files. These songs are only available from Sony’s Connect MP3 download service.

In comparison to Apple’s 20GB iPod, the Sony Walkman hard drive version will last 2.5x longer and hold twice as many songs in the Atrac format than in Apple’s AAC format.

Sony’s president Kunitake Ando says this battle could go on for more than a year, “I don’t know if we can take this market back in a year … But this launch is our message that we will work hard to put an end to the dominance by just one company.”






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