Victor's Latest XA-F112 and XA-F52 Players

We witnessed an explosion of players this summer, all coming more or less full-featured, but certainly miniature-sized and good looking.

This is also the case of the brand new XA-F112 and XA-F52 audio players launched by Victor, a Japanese manufacturer, that come in baby-sizes and two storage capacity versions - 512MB and 1GB, being able to seize 250 or 500 tracks (depending on the capacity), and, of course, several colors.

Except for the different capacities, the players have the same features, even the weight and the size is the same - 40 grams and 32 x 80 x 24 mm.

The battery life is pretty impressive too, sporting up to 17 hours of continuous playback. However, the supported main menu can be set only in Japanese or English, but the titles of the tracks can be recognized and displayed in other 27 languages. Speaking of the tracks, both players support only part of the popular formats such as MP3, WMA and WMA-DRM9.

The 1GB XA-F112 comes in four colors at a suggested street price of 13,000Yen (about $114), while 512MB XA-F52 comes in five different colors 17,000Yen (about $150).

Sony has also launched a new line-up of miniature colorful players that are NAND flash based, being able to store up to 1,350 songs on the 2GB model, 685 songs on the 1GB model and 340 songs on the 512MB model at 48kbps.

The battery life is enhanced as well; it can enable playing up to 28 hours of non-stop music. The NW-E Series features the same quick-charge function introduced by Sony earlier this year, a capability that enables the user to benefit from three hours of playback for only three minutes of charging.

The NW-E Walkman series is also compatible with several formats such as AAC (non-DRM), MP3, WMA (non-DRM), and ATRAC music files.