80s Era Walkman vs. iPod Touch

I was a teenager when the Sony Walkman was invented, an easily portable device which made it possible for us to travel anywhere and listen to our favorite music cassettes on headphones. Over the years, I've owned several Walkmans - usually cheaper brands but at least once I owned an actual Sony Walkman. Thirty years later and now in my forties, I own an iPod Touch, 4th generation, with 32 gigabytes of storage space. I prefer the iPod Touch to my old Walkman(s), mostly for obvious reasons, and sometimes while walking around with my iPod I've tried to imagine how the two music delivery systems - the Walkman and the iPod Touch - would stack-up alongside each other. That's the purpose of this blog entry. The iPod Touch (which I sometimes refer to as an "iTouch," although Apple doesn't use that designation) has the huge advantage of being more than just a device which plays music; it can also freely perform dozens of other functions, the most wonderful one being its ability to connect the user to the Internet from wherever he is, provided he can find a wireless Internet signal, or "WiFi." (In fairness to the Walkman on this score, the Internet didn't even exist in the 1980s, so connecting to it would've been more than impossible for the Walkman device. Also, it should be noted that the iPod is an electronic, digital device - a portable computer of sorts - while the Walkman was just an electrical device with buttons which activated mechanical gears and such.) But the iPod can connect to the Internet, and be used as a calculator, an address book, an electronic notepad, an electronic calendar, a digital watch, a camera, a highly-detailed world map, a handheld gaming device, etc... and without additional cost. (These are just some of the free applications the iTouch has. Then there's all the "apps" which can be bought and added to it, most notably thousands of videogames.) Obviously, this is all one immense advantage for the iTouch over the Walkman, but collectively these advantages seem unfair to the Walkman, so lets temporarily ignore all these other functions the iTouch can perform and focus purely on the two devices' primary function, that of a music delivery system. How does the Walkman stack-up against the iPod Touch on a purely musical level? Let me briefly mention and then get past the issue of the two devices' SOUND QUALITY. Although compact disc (CD) technology became available at about the same time as the Walkman, it wasn't until the later invention of the "Sony Discman" that CDs could be played on a portable device. No, with our Walkmans, we were playing cassettes, and therefore the music we were listening to was of "cassette quality." The music we listen to on our iPods and other MP3 players, naturally, is of digital quality - which is to say, CD quality and better. A huge advantage for the iPod, of course, but I still haven't arrived at the apex of my comparison between the two devices: size and portability... which is to say, convenience. Let's get to that issue next; it's what I've been wanting to say all along... (to be continued)