The new Sony MP3 Walkman was billed as the company’s long-awaited answer to the iPod and became one of the biggest-selling electrical items for Christmas.

But Sony admitted that the software sold with the player has “major problems”, which has left many owners unable to use the players. The Connect Player programme is designed to transfer music from the user’s computer to the player and to connect them to Sony’s music sales website. But distraught buyers have been posting messages on websites cursing Sony. Others have returned their £199 players for a refund.

A woman called Amy wrote that her boyfriend bought her the Sony player for Christmas after she asked for an iPod. She said: “After three bottles of wine, 60 fags and trying all night to get some songs on the thing, me and my boyfriend are over. This morning I tried again, failing and throwing the mouse at the wall. Help!” John Dolan, a software designer from Cambridge, bought the players as presents for his 12-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son. He spent the two weeks before Christmas trying, without success, to get them to work properly.

He said: “They have caused me a lot of stress and have completely spoiled my kids’ Christmas as they were not able to use their presents.”

Sony, the company that began the portable music revolution with the cassette tape-playing Walkman in 1979, was a late entrant in the race to take on the iPod. It finally produced its new Walkman range in Europe and Japan in early November. The top specification machine is smaller than a pack of playing cards and can hold more than 10,000 songs. It has a concealed screen and an iPod-shaming battery life of 35 hours.

The players were an instant success. Both the 6gb NW-A1000 and the 20gb NW-A3000 flew off the shelves despite costing £149 and £199 respectively.

Unfortunately for a significant number of purchasers, the bundled software refused to work. Users complained that they were unable to get the Connect Player programme to load on to their computers. Others found their machines crashing or got bored waiting hours for signs of life.

Six weeks after the launch Sony released a software update designed to solve the most obvious problems. Sony conceded this week that there are “major problems” with the Connect Player software. The company is advising owners to uninstall Connect Player and download an earlier programme called SonicStage, which means that some of the newest features are unusable.

Sony, which sold products worth £36.6 billion worldwide last year, is unique in that it not only manufactures the players but owns much of the music. Some users suspect that the root cause of their problems is digital rights management (DRM) and the complex layers of protection Sony builds into its software to prevent users copying music without paying.

Gregory Kukolj, Sony’s general manager for Europe, admitted that there had been a higher than usual number of returns for a new product but told The Times that many of the initial problems had been corrected by the software upgrade last month.

He said that “certain people” had failed to download the upgrade, which was why they were still experiencing problems. The problems in Europe have delayed the launch date of the players in the US market, which was originally this month, but is now unknown.

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