Although the younger generations have rarely heard about anything but the iPod as far as portable multimedia playback is concerned, people who were enjoying their teen years back in the 80's and 90's will surely remember Sony's portable Walkman players, which were coveted by pretty much everyone back then, or at least by those who wanted to enjoy their music wherever they might have gone.

However, times and technology evolved, and the age of the portable cassette player passed, with the portable MP3 player (and later on, portable media player) becoming the true ruler in this segment. Unfortunately, Sony never managed to attain the same level of popularity it enjoyed back in the cassette playing Walkman's days, but it sure tried to, rolling out a fairly large number of Walkman portable MP3 and multimedia players that address pretty much all of the consumer categories out there.

While not being able to duplicate the iPod's popularity in terms of content provision, Sony's Walkman devices do offer some very advanced playback features, sound canceling being one of the Japanese company's best weapons in their fight for market dominance. Moreover, these tiny players also pack some pretty impressive batteries, being able to deliver a functioning life we've never thought possible for a device of this type.

Before moving to more recent models (which we promise to do in the near future), we decided to take for a spin Sony's S-Series NWZ-S739F Walkman player, an ultra-thin portable media player that manages to provide quite a good audio quality, super sound-canceling, as well as a really easy and intuitive operation.

As some of you might point out, this device has been around for quite some time now, but that doesn't make it less impressive, especially when faced with some of its other competitors available on the market.