We all take listening to music and watching videos on the go now, but you only have to go back to the early 1980s to find out where it all began.
Three decades ago, the Sony Walkman was launched on the UK market and started a revolution. For the first time, it was easy to listen to pre-recorded music on the go, even if it meant carrying multiple cassettes or, more likely, listening to the same tape over and over again. Incredibly bulky by today’s standards, but considered compact when it was released, the Walkman set the standard for others to follow. Anyone who can remember carrying around such an original portable cassette Walkman will be more than a little taken aback by the capability of today’s portable devices and also by their incredibly compact and battery-efficient design.
However, by 1984 the previously massively bulky player had shrunk to little more than the size of the cassette it was playing, and the batteries lasted much longer, too. The same year a CD-based version of the cassette player, known as the Discman, was released. A minidisc version followed a few years later, but all those connected devices played some pre-recorded media format, rather than being able to store music digitally on the device.
It was the advancement of USB devices in the early 21st century that paved the way for today’s plethora of digital portable music devices. In little more than a decade they have progressed to the point where they are now capable of storing more than 100 hours of music, which is equivalent to 250 albums. For example, an 8GB Apple iPod nano is capable of storing 2,000 songs or eight hours of video, or a combination of both.
MP3 players and iPods can run for about 24 hours of continuous audio without recharging or, if you prefer, five hours of video playback. Weighing just over an ounce and a half, these devices are now truly portable, to the point where they’re smaller than the cassettes that went into the original portable music device: the Walkman.
In fact, the functionality has now progressed to the point where music and video players are now built into smartphones, such as the built-in iPod in the iPhone 3GS. This means fewer devices need to be carried, as the smartphone now performs all the functions of a music and video player, camera, and web browser; functionality that could only be dreamed of in the 1980s!