Sony takes aim at iPod

The announcement comes hours after Apple unveiled the pencil-thin "iPod nano" digital player and a long-anticipated mobile phone that plays music in a bid to extend its domination of the market.

"Our previous models have been well accepted by customers in Japan and the United Kingdom. But we are not at all satisfied with where we are now," said Koichiro Tsujino, co-President of Connect, a Sony unit which makes portable music players and offers online music distribution services.

"I understand a certain company made an announcement earlier today. We will accelerate our challenge with these new models," he told a news conference.

Sony, which created the portable music market 26 years ago with its now-legendary cassette-playing Walkmans, has lost out to Apple in the portable digital era as it focused on its mainstay CD and Mini Disc players.

Sony will offer two hard disk-based music players -- one with a storage capacity of 20 gigabytes (GB) and the other with 6 GB -- and three flash memory-based players that will keep the existing models' perfume bottle appearance.

The 6 GB model is Sony's first hard-disk player with a small capacity. Apple's iPod nano comes in 2 GB and 4 GB capacities.

Sony's new models will add the ability to automatically select and play the songs a user listens to most, and also to pick songs released in a certain year -- a function Sony calls the "time machine shuffle."

The new models will go on sale in Japan on November 19 and Sony, which introduced the first Walkman in July 1979, aims to launch them overseas by the end of the year.

The 20 GB hard-disk model, capable of storing up to 13,000 songs, is expected to retail at around 35,000 yen in Japan, Sony said.