A major addition to Sony Ericsson’s family of Walkman phones was announced todayby Sony. The W950 is an ultra-slim, ultra-stylish, UMTS-enabled device with 4GB of onboard storage complete with touch screen for simple navigation through music genres, playlists, individual songs or music albums.

This is more than a music phone, broadband-fast email and Web browsing plus a suite of high performance entertainment applications add to its capabilities, making it one of the most highly specified phones from Sony Ericsson.

“Bringing the Walkman brand to Sony Ericsson phones was one of our outstanding achievements in 2005 and we have now sold more than 3 million Walkman phones,” said Miles Flint, President, Sony Ericsson, “W950 is our sixth Walkman phone to be introduced since that announcement and listening to music on mobile phones is now an established and growing consumer behaviour. This announcement also demonstrates the flexibility of the Symbian v9.1 and UIQ 3.0 platform to create a consumer focused offering as well as business and the W950 is now our third Symbian based handset to be introduced in 2006.” [Read more...]

Nokia announced three new mobile phones at the 3GSM mobile phone trade show today, including a phone that may be one of T-Mobile’s first Wi-Fi/cellular handsets. All 3 phones were midrange phones.

The relatively nondescript 6136 flip phone uses UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access), a technology which lets any Wi-Fi hotspot act as an extension of a cellular network. T-Mobile, which owns both thousands of hotspots and a nationwide mobile phone network, has previously said they’re interested in this technology.

Nokia also announced the 6131 flip phone, which seems to be a distant relative of Motorola’s PEBL U6. Like the PEBL, the 6131 is a flip phone made of a velvety, soft-touch plastic with a one-button flip-to-open mechanism.

“We expect that the Nokia 6131 … will sell in tens of millions over its lifetime,” said Kai Oistamo, executive vice president and general manager of Nokia’s mobile phones division.

The new Nokia 6070 is aimed at more basic consumers, Oistamo said. It’s a color-screen, candy bar style tri-band phone with an FM radio, VGA camera and EDGE modem. Most importantly, it’s easy to use, Oistamo said.

“There is a sizeable demographic in the consumer base that just wants a sweet and simple phone. large keys, large display, large fonts,” he said.

The 6070 will be available for $160 or less by June.

Olilla also went into Nokia’s plans for WiMAX. WiMAX handsets are definitely under development at Nokia, he said, but we shouldn’t expect to see much before 2008.

“We will be coming out with voice-over-IP products having WiMAX capability. We think it’s a good complementary technology for cellular wideband, and will form the core of the multi-radio capabilities that a good multi-radio phone will have,” he said.

[tags]Nokia, cell phone, 6136, 6070, 6131, flip phone, wimax, hotspots[/tags]