As people moved more into the digital world and there was no space for the Discmans and Walkmans of the world. Other brands like Creative too joined the MP3 bandwagon. Reportedly, the Yepp stood for “young, energetic, passionate people” - Samsung never confirmed the acronym though.
MP3 PLAYER 2000S PORTABLE
Samsung too threw its hat in in the MP3 ring in 1999 by launching Yepp, its series of portable music players. It also had a LCD screen that told users what song was playing. The flash-based MP3 player came in 32MB and 64MB capacity, which meant you could store 6 or 12 songs on it. The era of MP3 players: Music on the go It was in 1997, when South Korean company Saehan Information Systems launched the world’s first MP3 player. The Discman, in theory, was supposed to be the cooler version of Walkman but its sales never really peaked. Even though CDs were around for sometime, they never really achieved the mass level of popularity of audio cassettes. The Discman came nowhere close to the popularity of the Walkman because CDs were expensive to buy and cumbersome to carry around. The Discman years: Hit and miss Five years after launching the Walkman, Sony introduced the Discman - a portable CD player. While a host of brands made portable audio cassette players, they were all referred to as the Walkman. Sony sold over 400 million units of WalkMan and officially retired it in 2010. From Timbuktu to Trivandrum, the Walkman was what the Apple iPod became in the early 2000s: a device the cool kids carried and something which everyone wanted. The millennials might not be able to relate to the phenomenon – and it was truly a phenomenon that lasted for close to two decades – but the Walkman was a device that and made you ‘cool’. The Walkman: Where it all started The Sony Walkman was introduced to the world on Jand was perhaps one of the first lifestyle gadget. Portable music players - in whatever form - have been a part of popular culture for more than four decades now. After the Walkman, came the Discman, which gave way to MP3 players, that in turn led to the birth of iPod, which was the genesis of the iPhone in more than one way and the world since then has never been the same. The Sony Walkman was a torchbearer of portable music for many years but then technology does have little time for nostalgia and it evolves at a rapid pace. Among other things like The Beatles, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the few gadgets on the list was Sony’s Walkman. A few years ago, a former Apple executive who was in the team behind design and development of the first iPhone revealed a list of things that inspired Apple’s flagship product.