Sony Walkman NW-ZX900: Leak reveals launch timing for 122% faster music player

The Sony Walkman NW-A306 ($398 on Amazon) and the more expensive NW-ZX707 were announced in January 2023. Three years later, these music players are no longer available in many regions. The reason for this is likely the upcoming launch of new Walkmans. The Walkman Blog has learned that the Sony Walkman NW-ZX900 is set to hit the market in late 2026 or early 2027.

The next-generation Sony Walkman is reportedly already listed on Sony’s servers, though no further details on its features have been revealed yet. A benchmark leak at the end of 2025 already showed that the Sony Walkman NW-ZX900 will receive a significant performance upgrade. The specifications of the built-in ARM chip suggest that Sony is swapping the Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS4290 based on the Snapdragon 660 with a chip based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3.

With four ARM Cortex-A720 performance cores and four Cortex-A520 efficiency cores, the processor features a significantly more modern architecture. As our benchmarks show, the Sony Walkman NX-ZX900 is expected to deliver more than twice the performance of the NW-ZX707. Sony has equipped it with 8 GB of RAM. The more modern 4 nm ARM chip, instead of the older 11 nm chip, should operate much more efficiently, enabling longer battery life, while Wi-Fi 6E allows for faster music and app downloads. So far, no details are available regarding what other upgrades the music player will receive besides the new processor.