How long has it been since you've held a Walkman in your hands? Can you remember the last time you stuck a mixtape that you made into your cassette player and walked down the street? I bet many of you don't even have tapes kicking around the house anymore, the days of sticking a pencil into one of the wheels to wind the tape back up a distant memory.
Well, thanks to Maxell, those days might be about to head back faster than you think, though without constantly needing to thumb batteries in or going out and buying wired headphones. Meet the Maxell MXCP-P100, a tape player with a built-in rechargeable battery and USB-C fast charging. And, as you know from the title of this article, it also has the function to hook up your Bluetooth headphones or a wireless speaker.
The MXCP-P100 is launching in two colours (black and white) in Japan first for a price of ¥13,000, which is around £66 or $90. According to Sound Guys, sales of cassette tapes were up 204.7% in Q1 of 2025 - physical media is making a huge comeback in a world where people are sick of not owning their media, and we couldn't be happier about it.
This cassette player has all of the usual settings you'd expect on a Walkman too - rewind, fast forward, pause, etc, and it comes in at 12.2 cm x 9.1 cm x 3.8 cm. It's not an MP3 player, and you can't download music to it. But you can stick the 'Now That's What I Call Music' tapes from your attic into it and relive the soundtrack of your youth while at the gym!
Whether Maxell will start shipping to other countries will undoubtedly depend on how successful this does in Japan, so fingers crossed the take up is good and we're all walking down the road with one before Christmas!
