No Rock And Roll Fun

SONY FALLS SHORT: Early reviews of the new Sony Walkman are suggesting that it leaves a lot to be desired, although it does have a longer battery life than the iPod. Stephen Williams' Newsday review basically hits the nail on the head: this is a hard-disc product from a company that's spent the last five years betting on MiniDisc as the way to store your downloads, and it shows.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, Sony's link-up with McDonalds to promote its Connect download service seems to have flopped, if our local burger house is typical. Despite a couple of posters advertising the 'buy a Big Mac, get a free download offer', my wife didn't get any mention of a download with her meal yesterday. So we wandered up to the counter and asked if we were meant to get a voucher of some sort. "Erm... " the assistant clearly had no idea what we were talking about, and hazzarded a guess that the promotion might be over. She asked a superior colleague, who, after a couple of minutes looking at the poster, turned to us apologetically and said "We've not got any." Clearly, we were the first people even to have bothered asking about the offer - and McDonalds aren't even that arsed about it. The promotion is meant to have been running for a month already, and has another seven days to go - and yet the staff at branch don't appear to even know it's going on. There is a possibility that all 2.9 million tracks offered have been downloaded already, but somehow, we doubt that very much. In effect, it seems: not only can they not give away Sony Connect tracks for free, but they can't even be arsed to bother.