Sony squeezes MP3 player into cell phone

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by Martyn Williams

(IDG) -- Sony has married its Walkman technology with a cell phone and come up with a handset that will be music to its owner's ears.

The company's latest cellular handset, which just began selling in Japan, includes a digital music player that lets it double as a digital Walkman. The unit accepts Magic Gate Memory Stick cards, the white version of the memory card system with integrated copy protection. The handset has a special mode that allows the user to switch off the telephone while the music player continues to function.

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The company did not indicate when the device might be sold outside Japan.

The new handset is, not surprisingly, one of the most expensive handsets to hit the market to date, with an average price of about $382. In Japan, where the price of handsets is subsidized by the dealers and carriers, new telephones usually hit the market for half that price or less. When you consider the price of Sony's digital music players, which cost around $200 to $250, the price of the new phone appears more reasonable.

Small package, big variety

The handset weighs about 4.2 ounces, which is on the heavy side compared to most new wireless phones, which weigh between 2.8 and 3.5 ounces. But it packs a lot more technology than competing models. It measures 4.2 by 2 by 1.1 inches. Sony says talk time is 100 minutes, standby time is 200 hours, and music playback time is six hours on a single battery charge. The estimated battery life is an hour longer than Sony's digital Network Walkman E3, which is due on the market soon.

Other features include a 256-color LCD (liquid crystal display) with 120-by-160-pixel resolution, and the capability to store up to 16 ringer melodies in memory. New melodies can also be downloaded at the touch of a button through the wireless Internet service.

The NTT DoCoMo version supports the company's I-mode wireless Internet service and packet data transmission at up to 9.6 kilobits per second, while the Au version supports the EZweb service that uses Wireless Application Protocol and packet data transmission at up to 64 kilobits per second.

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