We’ve been hands-on with Sony’s latest addition to the Walkman family at the London launch and, while it’ll have to go some way to beat the all-conquering iPod Touch and iPhone duopoly, we’ve come away impressed.

Sony is emphasising the sheer quality afforded by the new Walkman and, on first impressions, it’s hard to disagree: the unit itself, while small and light, felt more than solid enough to cope with pockets and backpacks, and the four sides of the X-series are covered in a stylish mottled pattern that lends the Walkman a bit of personality aside from the familiar logos plastered all over it.

The OLED touchscreen itself carries on the theme of quality: it feels practically as responsive as the screens on Apple’s products, is pretty sharp and bright and, with a height of three inches and resolution of 432 x 240, large enough to display album covers, videos and pictures, as well as the web thanks to the in-built WLAN and browser. A direct link to YouTube is also provided, as is an area for managing podcasts, and the touchscreen is accompanied by hardware controls for music on top and a ‘Home’ button at the bottom.

Sound quality seemed up to muster, too, with plenty of rich bass complimenting snappy, accurate treble. Sony is talking up its noise-cancelling technology – it’s claiming that the X-series if the world’s first mp3 and video player with digital noise cancellation – but our first impressions suggest that the cancellation is subtle rather than intrusive. The player has three noise cancellation modes – for trains, planes and offices – so we’ll test those more thoroughly when we get our hands on the X-series for review.

The new Sony X-series is available in any colour as long as it’s black and, while not having the thousands of applications of the iPod Touch, is looking like it could be a rival: excellent sound quality, a vivid and responsive touchscreen and a decent range of features should appeal to those who value the sound of their music over Apple’s legendary design. Prices rival Apple’s, too: £209 inc VAT for the 16GB model and £279 for double that capacity.

Will it be worth the cash? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below, and keep checking the PC Pro site for a review soon.

Digging through my drawers, what did I unearth? None other than my old HTC Touch, and I have to admit to falling in love with it all over again. Because, unlike the Diamond, it’s not incredibly annoying!

Why? First of all, and more important than anything else on a phone, the interface is simpler and more effective. No fancy flow effects might mean it’s less beautiful to behold than the Diamond (and its physical design is certainly more mundane), but it’s so much quicker to get to a favourite application – two presses rather than making a succession of gestures that look great on demos but are a pain in the arse in real life.

And I’m really not missing 3G (if I did, the HTC Touch 3G is now available). Admittedly, I don’t spend much of my time on the internet when using a phone, but when I do head over to BBC Sport or Facebook Mobile I find them no slower on the Touch than I did on the Diamond.

Likewise I’ve never really found a use for fancy features the Diamond includes over the original Touch, such as GPS, and frankly – for me at least – a lower-res screen of 240 x 320 is perfectly acceptable in return for slightly longer battery life.

I do realise that phones are a matter of personal preference, and I’d love to hear from anyone who actually likes the Diamond. Somehow, though, I don’t expect to get much response.

Yet, the supermaket goliath joined Microsoft on the stage here at PDC in LA this week, to unveil a prototype shopping application that the company hopes will be launched by the second half of next year.

Although not a solely Windows 7 touch application – it works with a mouse/keyboard and XP/Vista too – the software gives a glimpse into how touchscreen PCs could be used in places like the kitchen, where there’s not always space for a mouse and keyboard.

The software acts as a message board, a calendar, a picture pinboard – and of course a place to do your online shopping without even thinking about it. Recipe and meal suggestions constantly pop-up, with the option to add ingredients to your shopping basket, simply by dragging and dropping them from one side of the screen to the other.

It’s hard to get a feel from these screenshots, but the software contains lots of nice 3D touches, such as the option to spin around birthday cakes with the flick a finger to take a look at the decoration on the back, and even the lift the cake out of the box. The feature that got the PDC crowd most animated was the integrated barcode scanner, which means you can wave your empty milk carton in front of your webcam and it will automatically be added to your shopping basket.

Tesco’s head of R&D, Nick Lansley, told me that the company is working with university students to port the application to the iPhone. He’s also not ruling out the possibility of building it into dedicated hardware. “We’re prepared to look at a special Tesco appliance,” he said, although pre-installing it on the PCs that Tesco already sells is a more likely option.

Lansley insists the supermarket won’t use it to track users’ shopping habits (at least, not any more than it does so already with its Clubcard scheme). But Tesco is opening up the APIs, so that partners can build thier own promotional widgets into the software. It makes cutting coupons out of the newspaper look so last century…

If this week’s PDC is anything to go by, Microsoft is certainly winning over the dev elopers. The Surface tables that are dotted around the convention centre are attracting attendees like bees round a honeypot. So, to a lesser extent, are the demonstrations of Windows 7 running on HP Touchsmart PCs. 

I’ve just come from a session devoted to helping developers adapt their applications for multitouch, and whilst the sizeable hall wasn’t full, there must have been 300-400 people listening and tapping out notes on the demonstrations.

 Microsoft’s program manager Reed Townsend told the audience that he didn’t “think we’ve really scratched the surface yet on what a great touch UI could look like.” I think he’s right, and I worry that Microsoft’s decision to stick with the same Windows desktop for both touch and non-touch PCs proves his point.

Today’s touch PCs, such as the HP Touchsmart mentioned above, rely on a dedicated touch overlay to make the UI more finger friendly. In my opinion, boosting the size of the icons on the Taskbar and adding the Ribbon interface to native applications doesn’t go anywhere near far enough to make Windows 7 a true touch OS.

I asked Mike Nash, vice president of Windows Product Management, why the company hadn’t designed a separate touch UI for Windows 7. “It was more straightforward for us from a development point of view,” he replied. “Besides, Windows with touch and Windows without touch – it will be hard to get developers to spend a lot of time on it,” he added.

He may have a point. But in my experience touch only really works when the UI is specifically tailored to suit, which is why the iPhone makes Windows Mobile look so cack-handed. Let’s hope the hundreds of developers at today’s session have a better grasp of that than Microsoft does. 

I’ve been using the HTC Touch as my regular phone for over a year, so I won’t deny it. I jumped up and down a bit, such was my excitement to hear about the new “improved” version – the HTC Touch Diamond. And I was almost buzzing with anticipation when it arrived in the office yesterday.

But I’ll be honest. My first few experiences with the phone have dampened my ardour. It looks quite nice, with its diamondesque back and glass-dominated front, but it’s so slow it makes a British tennis player look nippy around the court.

For example, the 3D animated menus don’t keep up with your commands – there’s a full half-second lag on occasion. When you try and use Windows Mobile rather than HTC’s TouchFLO interface it’s also slow. In fact, everything’s slow.

There are lots of nice touches that may yet win me round. The built-in gyroscopic accelerometer, which detects whether the screen should be in portrait or landscape mode (and the clever marbles-down-the-hole game that HTC has bundled to show it off).

The web browser, based on Opera Mobile, which makes viewing websites a pleasure. The already-mentioned TouchFLO interface, which means you hardly need to use Windows Mobile at all anymore (an improvement we desperately called for when originally reviewing the Touch). The rather nice on-screen keyboard.

Look out for the in-depth review later this week.