Sony Ericsson announces new Walkman phone
Upping the ante in cell phones and MP3 players, this cell phone maker's latest entry offers 4GB of music storage, the same as Apple's iPod Nano.
"Bringing the Walkman brand to Sony Ericsson phones was one of our achievements in 2005 and we have now sold more than 3 million Walkman phones," Sony Ericsson President Miles Flint said in a statement.
The Japanese-Swedish joint venture, which was the world's fifth-biggest handset maker in 2005, unveiled its sixth Walkman model.
The W950, a purple 3G phone with an orange backlight and 4 gigabytes of flash memory storage capacity to hold thousands of songs, provides the same storage as Apple Computer's iPod Nano MP3 music players. The device, due in the third quarter, will be priced between 300 and 400 euros ($357-$476).
"This certainly ups the ante in the battle between Apple and the phone makers for mobile music," said analyst Ben Wood at market research group Gartner.
The W950 runs on the Symbian operating system. Sony Ericsson said the choice of Symbian underlined that the British software maker now also caters to phones for consumers and not just the small niche of expensive smartphones for business users.
It is Sony Ericsson's third Symbian model launched in 2006.