NW-E73

The NW-E73 is another Europe-only 128MB variant of the third-generation E Series. It provides ATRAC and MP3 support on built-in flash storage, displayed through an LCD screen, and delivers up to 70 hours of playback from one AAA battery. Like the NW-E55, it represented the more affordable capacity options in the European third-generation E Series.

Another Europe-oriented branch of the same stabilized third-generation E Series platform, and a good example of how Sony was beginning to use the E line as a scalable consumer product instead of a sequence of conceptual experiments. The fundamentals were now familiar: compact flash storage, long battery life, and support that made the player feel less trapped inside Sony-only logic than the earliest generations had. It is part of the point when Sony's flash Walkman had stopped asking whether the category worked and had started asking how many different ways it could be packaged and sold.