Antony’s Mobile Blog

February 9th. 2007, 9:56pm

As you may notice that I am normally discussing about Symbian OS phones. This time, I am writing something different, i.e. Sony Ericsson Walkman series. Why? To be honest, Sony Ericsson’s marketing team has kindly sent me a brand new Sony Ericsson W810i.

Let’s start…. I am sure that all of you are familiar with Walkman brand. Walkman is a portable audio players manufactured by Sony. It has a very long history, started in 1979 with cassette-based player. A few years later, Sony released several other product lines, such as CD Walkman and MP3 player.

I don’t have the latest figure of Walkman sales. I believe more than 350 million Walkman devices have been sold since 1979. Sony had been very success with their Walkman products until Apple came to the market with iPod. In the past years, they have lost much of the audio player market share to Apple and other companies, such as Creative.

Sony has tried gaining back their market share by expanding Walkman brand to mobile phones with Sony Ericsson Walkman. As you know, mobile phone market is very hot these days (almost 1 billion mobile phones are sold last year). How is Sony doing with their Walkman phones? They claim more than 20 million Walkman phones have been sold so far.

Anyway, let’s go the most interesting part: Sony Ericsson Walkman product lines. For your information, every Walkman phones have “W” prefix at the beginning of model number, such as W810i. There are currently 14 models of Walkman phones. Two of them were announced three days ago, i.e. W880/W888 and W610. Here is the list of Walkman phones.

Low-end phones

Sony Ericsson W200i, W200a, W200c
Sony Ericsson W300i, W300c

Middle-class phones

Sony Ericsson W550i, W550c
Sony Ericsson W600i, W600c
Sony Ericsson W610i, W618c
Sony Ericsson W700i, W700c
Sony Ericsson W800i, W800c
Sony Ericsson W810i, W810c

High-end phones

Sony Ericsson W830i, W830c
Sony Ericsson W850i
Sony Ericsson W880i, W888c
Sony Ericsson W900i, W900c
Sony Ericsson W950i, W950c

14 Responses to “Getting to Know Sony Ericsson Walkman”

Shahul Hameed. V.K Says:
February 17th, 2007 at 12:18 pm

let me know the OS of Sony Ericsson w700i…Its advantages/shortcomigs as against symbian OS..

Antony Pranata Says:
February 17th, 2007 at 1:43 pm

@Shahul: From my understangin, W800i and W700i use proprietary operating system from Sony Ericsson.
The advantage is that it is a light-weight operating system. You may have heard that many smart phones operating system crash a lot. Since it is a closed OS, most likely it won’t be infected by viruses too.
The disadvantage is, of course, lack of smart phone features, such as native third party applications. There are some Java applications, but they can’t utilize all the phones features.

Andrena Markley Says:
March 23rd, 2007 at 4:45 am