ROCK ON

'Staying Alive' could well be the anthem for Sony's Walkman digital music player. Despite the invasion of the iPods and other MP3 players, the Walkman continues to thrive. The new E Series comes with a lithium-ion rechargeable battery, which needs only three minutes of charge time for three hours of non-stop music playback in Sony's proprietary Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding compressed audio format. When fully charged, it serves up to 28 hours of music playback. It measures 24.8 x 79 x 13.6mm and weighs 25 grams. Priced at $888, the 1-gigabyte NW-E003F is in pink, blue, violet, black and lime green. The 2GB NW-E005F costs $1,188, and comes in black and violet.