Sony Ericsson shows shake-to-shuffle Walkman phone

Sony Ericsson's been busy, busy, busy this week: in addition to announcing an upgraded Cyber-shot camera phone, it debuted a pair of new Walkman music phones - once controlled simply by shaking, rattling or rolling it.

Sony Ericsson's W910: shake it up

The W910 has the flick-of-the-wrist control. Select its Shake option, and you can skip and shuffle around your music collection by doing just that: giving it a shake. The novel mechanism also works with games.

A slider phone kitted out in fiery "hearty red" hues, the W910 has a two-megapixel camera on the back, a 240 x 320, 262,144-colour screen on the front and a 1GB Memory Stick Micro for song storage - in addition to the 40MB of built-in memory. It has quad-band GSM/GPRS/Edge and 3G HSPDA connectivity, along with Bluetooth to link it to headsets and stereo headphones.

Sony Ericsson said it would also offer a 2.5G-only variant, the W908.

The W960 has Bluetooth stereo - aka A2DP - too, and like the W910 features TrackID which Sony Ericsson claimed can identify a song that's playing around you - on the radio, on the pub jukebox - and text back the title.

Sony Ericsson's W960: Symbian runner

What really makes the W960 stand out is its foundation on the Symbian operating system - it's smart phone as music phone - complete with 240 x 320, 262,144-colour touch screen, stylus and jog dial as per Sony Ericsson's P-series smart phones.

Likewise, it has Wi-Fi on board and the Opera web browser pre-loaded. For cellular connectivity, it has tri-band GSM/GPRS and 3G radios.

It's a more traditionally styled, black model, and comes bundled with a Bluetooth stereo headset. There's a 3.2-megapixel camera on board and 8GB of memory. Like the W910 it has an RDS-capable FM radio.

All three handsets are due to arrive in the shops in Q4.

More W910 and W960 pics on the next page