Oh, Sony, when will you learn?

It gives me no great pleasure to keep harping on about this but as long as Sony persists exclusively with its fatuous ATRAC format - a proprietary rival to MP3 - then its digital music strategy is damned.

Take Sony's NW-HD1, its belated rival to the iPod. It's a beautifully made 20GB music player, sleek and tiny. But it plays only ATRAC, which means all your gigabytes of MP3s must be converted (and thereby degraded) into ATRAC. It's a slow process and doubles the disk space required to hold your music collection (unless you throw away your original MP3s, not something I'd recommend).

Read more in this week's column about the NW-HD1, the oh-so-nearly iPod slayer.

Also, if you've scoped yesterday's post (do try to keep up), you'll know Halo 2, out Thursday, is a cracker. Also reviewed is the seminal Grand Theft Auto's latest and greatest episode: San Andreas - months of entertainment beckon.