Rebirth Of A Brand

There was a time, not so long ago, where the word WALKMAN synonymously meant mobile music player. For whatever reason, the WALKMAN brand did not evolve to meet consumers MP3 needs and as a result Apple's IPOD has become the world's must have mobile music player brand to date. So its about time Sony returned with a new device to challenge the competition!

SONY ERICSSON's WALKMAN branded phone devices are super sleek and super stylish and importantly have expandable memory slots to make your on the road music experience worthwhile. http://www.sonyericsson.com

A lot of thought has gone into the user interfaces of these devices. They have three dedicated hardware keys, one to launch the music application and two on the side to control your volume. The music application is a new Symbian UIQ app, and uses the touch screen for ease of user navigation. Similarly, users can browse album art associated with the songs they load onto the device.

Most users load music to their mp3 players via USB and not through mobile carrier channel downloads. I wasn't able to fully test SONY ERICSSON's desktop software, DISC2PHONE but at first sight, it does not appear to be as robust as Apple's iTunes (in that you only need ONE piece of software to manage and play your music library, import music, and export music to mobile devices). However, the DISC2PHONE software does allow for high-speed transfer of music from a computer hard drive to the device. For music library management users will need to use another 3rd party software app.