This week I met with Sony to check out their latest prototypes. When the company unveiled their new devices at the CES show in Las Vegas last month, several of them were early, non-working designs that were kept inside glass display cases. Time has quickly passed and the next batch of prototypes are up and working. I’m told I am among the first in the world to try them out and here’s my thoughts on the upcoming Walkman, HandyCam, and Cybershot releases.

Sony X Series Walkman Video MP3 Player NWZ-X1061

With built-in noise-cancellation, Wi-Fi access, and a gorgeous OLED touchscreen, Sony’s upcoming Walkman is a fantastic leap forward and by far my favorite of their new gadgets. It is so slim and thin, it reminds me of a flat Nestle chocolate bar. The 3” OLED screen looks quite large and delivers a bright and high resolution image, both for video and digital picture playback. The interface is pretty slick and the touchscreen controls are quick and responsive. You can access the different player modes using a grid of friendly icons with quick taps. When you pull up a photo album, you can flick through them like a vertical carousel, but if you hold your finger against the screen, you can also pan the camera, as it were, and see that carousel of photos from a raised angle that shows them leading off into the horizon.

It comes packaged with 13.5mm EX headphones that have combination earbuds, they are circular pads to fit into your ear, but the speakers themselves are the small inner ear so you just the comfort of traditional buds, but the seal and better sound quality of inner-ear designs. They include a selection of shaped plugs to help you match your ear type. The player itself offers exceptional sound quality with both Sony’s Digital Amplifier “S-Master” and Digital Sound Enhancement Engine offering enhanced playback. They gave me some Coldplay to listen to and it the quality is very impressive.The big bonus is the Digital Noise Cancelling, now offered for the first time as a feature built into the player itself, rather than as part of a separate set of expensive headphones. You can now use any headset you wish and the player includes its own “Quiet Mode” to help you block out intrusive ambient sounds without having to play music.

The Wi-Fi connection offers both web browsing and a direct application to YouTube for featured streaming clips. It also delivers guided access to downloading podcasts as well as streaming music through Music Meta Link. I managed to get the video of the two otters holding hands up and playing on it fine. Finally, it includes an FM radio and a wide support of files types and CODECs including MP#, WMA, AAC, L-PCM, AVC, H.264, MPEG-4, and WMV with DRM. No word on price, but it will be sold this summer with 32 GB of storage memory which is astonishing for its petite size. It only comes in one colour, black, with a craqueline finish that I’m not too hot about, but so far this is the best iPod alternative I’ve seen in years.

Sony W-series Walkman MP3 player NWZ-W202

Here Sony has taken a 2GB stick-shaped MP3 player, snapped it in half and added the two parts, each to the ends of a pair of wrap-around headphones. The two parts click together with a magnetic lock. So you break the player itself in half, like the clasp of a necklace, and place them into your ears, with the cord itself wrapping around the back of your neck. Everything is built around the earbuds themselves, including controls. There’s no dangling cables, just the one main cord going from left ear to right. Weird, right? The idea is to have it stay out of your way for exercising, jogging, and other active uses.

When you’re done using them, you snap the two parts together and then dock the unit as one piece, just like you would as normal. Well, the dock itself comes with a hidden suction cup-like feature, the base looks flat, there’s no visible “cup” or formation, but when you set it down onto a table surface, it grips it and takes a bit of a pull to release it. When you do charge it, it only takes a mere thirty minutes and you’ll get twelve hours of playback. The earbuds themselves are 13.5 mm EX designs, combining both outer ear buds with inner ear seals and swappable plugs. It supports DRM’d WMA files plus AAC, WMT, and MP3.

As there is no screen whatsoever, you will need to rely on playlists. TO help you quickly find the song you want, Sony has come up with a process they call “Zappin” which quickly plays a snippet of each song from the chorus instead of the first opening bars, which can be hard to identify. The idea is that you hit the Zappin button and let it cycle through your files and you hit the play button when you hear the song you want. Due out around May, they will be available in four different colours, including pink, and sell for $100. I like that Sony’s getting funky with their designs, but will have to wait until I can actually take a pair jogging or something to really figure this Walkman out.

Cyber-shot DSC-G3 Digital Camera

Imagine a pocket-sized digital photo frame. You have this block of plastic that is taken over by a massive screen on its face. There’s no controls, instead the display is a touchscreen and you can use it to look through pictures and view video clips. It has a built-in Wi-Fi connection so you can also access your web albums from sites like Picasa, Photobucket, Shutterfly, etc. (except Flickr).

Now, hidden inside that pocket frame is a Cyber-shot camera. When you grip the right side of the device and pull, the backside slides out to the side, revealing a set of camera controls next to the screen and a lens and flash on the rear of the device (which turns out to be the front).It’s a fine camera, offering 10 Megapixel with 4x optical zoom and Carl Zeiss lens. It includes Sony’s latest innovations ; Face Detection to make sure everyone’s smiling when the camera clicks, Smile Shutter to help correct those who only half-smile (with mixed results I might add), and Optical Steady Shot to balance out shaky hands. It comes with 4GB of memory (in addition to support for Memory Cards).In addition to offering a camera that can double as a pocket photo frame, the G3 can also upload photos using its Wi-Fi access. You can connect to any wireless hot-spot and from there upload your photos to an online web album.

The screen can display a kind of we browser view that allows you to configure the camera or sign into nearby hot-spots. Because the screen itself is of high resolution, the web interface if very fine and so they’ve included a stylus and an on-screen keyboard for you to use to enter in WEP codes, etc. Taking pictures with the camera is strange at first, there’s no viewfinder your shot is displayed across the screen itself which is as big as the camera. The onscreen controls are little too fine to use quickly and accurately, but these are things that just need getting used to. The G3 is an interesting concept, we’ll have to wait to see what the final product is like, Sony has yet to announce a release date or a price for it.

Sony DCR-SX40 4GB Flash Memory Handycam CamcorderSony’s new compact camcorders are hybrids, meaning they can record video both to an internal flash memory storage (4GB for the SX40, 32GB for the SX60) and to Memory Stick Pro Duos. From there you have the option to use a direct connection with a DVDirect Express DVD Writer (sold separately) to convert your movies to DVD. It offers a 60x optical zoom and a 2.7” wide touch panel LCD screen. It’s expected to launch some time next month and Sony has yet to say what the price will be.

The neat features include a 2000x digital zoom (not a typo) and the “zoom” microphone. When you use the zoom, the camcorder switches the microphone to focus its recording forward, reducing the chatter you get from those around you and increasing the reception of the sound in front. The 2000x digital zoom in insane. Yes, you can zoom in tight on wildlife or check out the audience on the other side of a sports stadium, from the nose-bleeder seats, although with considerable pixelization and so much camera shake that you’ll need to use a tripod to get any practical results. But boy, it is fun to play with.