All not well at Aiwa

Sony came storming off the blocks in January with plans to revitalise subsidiary Aiwa through a new range of audio players. A couple of months down the road, things aren't looking so rosy.

First, the promised AZ-FS256 headphone-type mp3 player with built in FM radio, to have launched this month, was cancelled in February when it became clear that developing an FM tuner of the necessary size and quality would have put the launch back dramatically.

Today, Sony announced delays to the remaining four models in the Aiwa range. The two Giga Pavit hard-disk players, the business-card-sized HZ-WS2000 and the shock-resistant HZ-DS2000, will be launched on May 21 instead of in April. The problem lies in the newly-developed one-inch 2GB hard disk, which isn't meeting reliability standards. Worse, this won't just result in a delay; Sony is downgrading to 1.5GB capacity drives, though pricing for the players themselves will stay the same as the smaller drives are no cheaper to procure.

As if that weren't enough, the two players compatible with Aiwa's Pavit USB memory drives, which were scheduled for launch in March and April, will now not be out until June 1--again, because they're not meeting Sony's reliability standards.

Small print on the Aiwa business card shown top right probably reads: "Don't blame us; we're just doing what the guys upstairs tell us..."

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]

Posted by aragoto at April 08, 2004 11:00 PM | TrackBack