The evolution of Sony Ericsson’s successful Walkman phone range takes another step forward today with the announcement of the UMTS enabled W850. Sony Ericsson’s first GSM/UMTS 'slider', the W850 has been uniquely combined with a full horizontal mode camera experience and the latest Walkman® player 2.0 for easy music download.

Available in Precious Black or Golden White, the phone has an attention grabbing ‘heartbeat illumination’ feature to light-up the control keys in rhythm with your music. Visually stunning and appealing to use, this phone isn’t just about good looks – it also offers blisteringly fast music downloads direct to the handset. The phone is configured for operator over the air (OTA) music download services and accepts many popular music file formats including e-AAC+, which reduces download time and space needed for tracks. Memory isn’t an issue either with a 1GB memory stick PRO Duo supplied which is enough for around 1,000 songs in e-AAC+. This can be expanded to 4GB so that you can store a much larger music collection and have it with you all of the time.

The Walkman® player 2.0 simplifies navigation through music genres, playlists, individual songs or music albums and there’s also a TrackID™ feature powered by Gracenote Mobile MusicID. This is a new service which means you can record a few seconds of a song, either via the microphone or the in built FM radio, and then with one click send that clip to the Gracenote® worldwide music database which will identify the track and relay the information back to the phone.

“The W850 is really empowering our users to listen to what they want, wherever they are,” said Jan Wäreby, Corporate Executive Vice President, Head of Sales and Marketing, Sony Ericsson. “Many people now have existing music collections stored in MP3. The W850 allows users to identify and buy music in a new and spontaneous way – hearing tracks they like, identifying them with TrackID™ and downloading them to the phone.”