T-Mobile's Robbie Williams-branded Sony Ericsson W300 Walkman phone will ship across Europe in time for the 9 June start of the European leg of the crooner's Close Encounters tour, the cellco said today.

Apparently "creatively influenced" by Williams himself - 'I want some pictures of me on it, right?' - the special edition handset has a picture of said gent in red superhero costume, though these are printed onto the phone's removable covers and can be replaced with the tour's more discreet Incredibles-incluenced R logo.

T-Mobile said the phone will ship with a video clip of the first song Williams will sing on the tour, which begins in South Africa, a special shutdown and start-up video, plus six Williams-themed wallpapers, a Robbie Williams ringtone, one of the star's bon mots for the SMS indicator, and a direct link to the star's WAP site.

The handset is a quad-band job - handy for Robbie groupies chasing the warbler around the globe - with EDGE support for faster GPRS data transfers. It has sufficient storage - 20MB on board and a bundled MemoryStick - for 70 songs and an FM radio.

The camera's just a 307,200-pixel job, with 4x digital zoom, but the 128 x 160 display is capable of showing 262,144 colours. Sony Ericsson said the phone will run for up to 400 hours on stand-by and provide up to nine hours' talk time.

T-Mobile didn't say how much it will expect fans to cough up for this telephonic merchandise, assuming they have enough left over from the t-shirts, badges, stickers, y-fronts etc.

Reviewing the product, Robbie incisively pronounced it "great". There you go, girls. ®