New Walkman Phone Sports Slim Design, Pedometer

At this week's CTIA conference in Orlando, Fla., Sony Ericsson showed off the forthcoming W580 Walkman Phone, a new Walkman-branded cell phone that will go on sale in select markets starting in the third calendar quarter of 2007. Pricing was not announced -- that's typically set by the carriers who sell the phones along with service plans.

The W580 features a sleek, 14mm-thick candybar shape, and sports a sliding design that reveals both a keypad and a 2.0 megapixel digital camera equipped with flash. The quad-band W580i ships with a stereo headset and includes 512MB of internal memory, as well as an Memory Stick Micro (M2) card slot to expand storage capacity up to 1GB. It's mass storage compatible, so you can plug it in to a computer and it'll be recognized as a flash storage device, for easy transfer of music files and other content.

The W580 is designed for active users, too, including a built-in pedometer and the ability to monitor running speed and performance. It can also be used as a modem and features GPRS and EDGE high speed transmission.

Other features include music recognition capabilities -- if you record a few seconds of music, the TrackID service can return song name, artist and album, built-in blogging capabilities and video clip support, Bluetooth, RSS newsreader and Web browser access, e-mail, MMS and other features.