Sony Adds hard drive ‘Airbag’ to Mp3 Player

Sony will this month ship its latest hard drive-based personal digital music player, this time adding a removable battery to the feature set and an anti-impact system to the unit’s hard disk.

Sony NW-HD5 digital music playerThe NW-HD5 is equipped with a 20GB drive, which sports a “G Sensor” to detect sudden drops and cushion the storage medium to prevent damage and data loss. IBM recently added such a mechanism to its ThinkPad hard drives, as did Apple with it laptops, but this is the first time we’ve seen the technique applied to portable music players.

The player goes on sale in Japan on 21 April for around ?35,000 (?172). There’s no word yet on European or US availability, but we note the Japanese unit incorporates English, French, German, Spanish and Italian language support, so a broader roll-out has to be on the cards.