As Steve Jobs was launching Apple's latest music products, and the critics were having a field day, Sony has relaunched its classic Walkman brand for the digital age. 

Sony's new digital music player is named simply 'Walkman' and comes with 20GB and 6GB hard drives, and has two new shuffle functions very similar to the iPod operating system. 

By selecting 'My Favorite Shuffle' the device automatically selects the 100 most listened to songs and plays them at random.

The 'Time Machine Shuffle' function randomly selects a year and plays all of the songs from that year currently held on the device.

It also features an 'Artist Link' function that searches every artist, album and song stored on the device, and offers suggestions of artists and bands closely linked to the genre of music being played at the time.

The devices have OLED displays (2in on the 20GB version and 1.5in on the 6GB model) and a four-way directional button. The 20GB Walkman can store around 5,000 tracks.

Smaller models will offer 2GB, 1GB and 512MB storage on flash memory cards.

Sony is in talks to offer songs on Apple's iTunes online store in Japan and currently offers access to its own Connect catalogue of one million tracks.