Sony has recently announced the release of a new Walkman for portable media loving folks in Japan which takes advantage of the area’s 1seg live television broadcast. The Walkman NW-A910 can not only pick up the 1seg signal but it can record video content directly to the player and you can schedule as many as 10 programs up to a month in advance for a total of 100 hours of recorded TV. Now that’s cool.

The new Walkman also sports an FM tuner, has the ability to record and encode your CD’s all inside the player and comes with some noise canceling headphones. All this in three different models with capacities of 4GB, 8GB or 16GB. It’s just hard not to like this little PMP.

Available Oct 19th, the new addition to the Gigabeat line is based on the Windows Mobile operating system and comes in three color styles: navy, gold and black. Toshiba is treading water with the functionality included in this 11.5×75×14.2mm / 168g package though.

The V41 boasts 4GB of internal memory and is expandable with SD or SDHC cards (up to 8GB) for storing up to 99 shows or 20 hours of streaming 1Seg TV. Based on Windows Mobile, the unit’s video playback is limited to WMV and JPEG images but plays MP3, WAV, and WMA/WMA-9 audio formats.

When the new slim PSP launches on September 20th, those with 1seg digital TV available in their area will be able to pick up television signals through their handheld game console.

The PSP-S310 1seg antenna will mount on the top of the PSP similar to how the EyeToy does and according to Kotaku will bring in so-so reception until they get some kinks worked out. Good reception or not this is both really cool and almost meaningless to us in the U.S. where 1seg just isn’t available.

Japan has had mobile digital television for almost a year now but it still hasn’t taken off due to technical obstacles, like poor carrier coverage and practically none on rapid speed transportation like Japan’s many train systems.

Nevertheless, that hasn’t prevented Japanese tech companies from bundling the 1seg service into just about every portable gadget they can think of, from cellphones to PMPs to GPS units. Now Sony wants to directly tackle the market by introducing the XDV-100 to consumers on April 10, hoping against hope that there’s still a market out there.

The screen is 2.8-inches wide and offers 320 x 340 rez, plus you also get a built-in AM/FM tuner, ear buds and a docking cradle for recharging for your 40,000 yen (about $330 of our Yankee bucks.) If the 1seg service can be beefed up …