Alas, poor Sony; if any company had a shot at unseating Apple from the Digital Music Throne, we thought it would be the tech-savvy consumer electronics giant who also happens to be one of the Big Five major record labels and who enjoyed decades of consumer worship for the invention of the Walkman. But between a lackluster online music store that sells songs in the proprietary ATRAC3 format and a slew of expensive portable digital music devices that can't even play MP3s, Sony has yet to become more than the faintest blip on the radar. Oh, how the mighty have fallen and they can't get up.

But don't count Sony out just yet, because the company is working to change all that. In addition to taking baby steps to introducing MP3 compatibility to some of its cheaper players (someday) (maybe), faithful viewer Frozen Tundra also notes that, according to Reuters, the company is planning a "marketing blitz in Europe" to get the word out to the people about its Connect music download store and its new iPodalikes, the ever-so-snappily-titled NW-HD1 and NW-HD2, which will no doubt soon be household names in Europe (at least among households that name their pets and children using strings of seemingly random alphanumeric characters). So will such a marketing push really be able to "derail the runaway momentum of Apple Computer's iTunes service"?

Well, um, if history is any indication, probably not. Let's not forget that the now-defunctish BuyMusic.com anticipated sales of a million songs a day and launched with a $40 million high-profile ad campaign that incorporated heavy-rotation TV commercials, giant billboards in Times Square, and CEO Scott Blum and spokescreep Tommy Lee weaseling their way onto every radio and TV show they could find-- all to less than no avail. Granted, BuyMusic was always the idiot cousin in the dysfunctional family of music download services, but Napster's "strength of brand" and TV commercials haven't exactly vaulted it into the lead, either, and RealNetworks pulling lame but headline-grabbing stunts like FreedomofMusicChoice.org and half-price downloads didn't get its sales volume anywhere near Apple's, even when it was losing money on every sale.

But Sony's a very different animal, and Europe is a very different market, so who knows what results a marketing assault across the pond might produce? And we haven't even mentioned Sony's trump card yet: the NW-HD2 now comes in silver, blue, and pink brushed aluminum, just like Apple's wildly successful iPod mini. Faithful viewer Small Paul notes that photos appear over at Engadget, which describes the players as "craptacular" because of their ATRAC3-only nature. Still, these things look enough like minis (minus green and gold options-- evidently Sony is happy relinquishing the lucrative leprechaun demographic to Apple) that there's no way consumers could ever tell the difference! What could possibly go wrong?