Oh no! Walkman walks online

From the ever-growing lever arch file in which I shove stories about "leaks" of stuff online that clearly are the first stage of a marketing campaign orchestrated by a naive PR company - it's got a picture of Paris Hilton stuck on the front, since you ask: Sony has somehow allowed photos of the new Walkman range to slide onto the internet.

Obviously, we're only judging on looks, but it seems like the design brief was "come up with something for people who think the Zune is too stylish..."

The struggle for Sony is that they seem to be wedded to the Walkman brand name - even although it means nothing to anyone younger than Cliff Richard; and for those of us old enough to remember what Walkman was can't hear the name without picturing a tape player. Calling your mp3 player the Walkman would have been like calling the original walkman a stereogram or something.