In CNN story teasingly titled “Will Sony’s new Walkman run over Apple’s iPod?“, they behave as if a smaller, cheaper player were something new on the market that the iPod hasn’t had to confront before, and that price and capacity are the reasons people buy the iPod. We’re pretty sure neither is true.

The real kicker of the story is buried toward the end:

As with Sony’s other players, the NW-HD1 plays songs in the company’s proprietary ATRAC format only, meaning it is not compatible with other online stores and cannot play tunes in the popular MP3 format.

Yup; it doesn’t play MP3. Nor does it play AAC, which iTMS uses, nor, we expect, does it play Microsoft’s WMA or WMA+DRM formats. Yeah, we’re sure Jobs & co. are quaking in their boots over this one.