After the long-awaited PSP phone (aka the Xperia Play) we kind of should have seen this, a Walkman phone, coming.
Though the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman doesn’t play cassette tapes like the Walkmans of old (sigh) it does come with access to Qriocity, Sony’s rather neat music streaming platform. We’ve had some hands-on time with this and can confirm that it’s pretty decent – the first real challenge to Spotify for Android in our books.
Cementing the music playing credentials of the Walkman phone is the inclusion of TrackID, a Sony Ericsson mainstay, and Sony’s xLOUD technology, promising powerful performance through the external speakers.
A dedicated Infinite hard key also takes pride of place on the Live with Walkman, which when pressed within the media player, loads up a list of info about the current playing artist, including music videos and lyrics. We’re sure that you could just use Google instead…
Speaking of Google, the Live with Walkman as you might have guessed is an Android phone. Running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, you also get the same Facebook Inside Xperia deal that we’ve seen on the recent Xperia phones, which is a good thing.
The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman has a 1GHz chip blazing away ‘neath its hood, a 5-megapixel camera that records at 720p HD, a front-facing camera and a 3.2-inch touchscreen.
All in all, sounding pretty good, though in the era of 4-inch screens, this could end up looking a little small. Those specs are otherwise pretty respectable, par for the course these days.
No release date has been given aside from a nebulous ‘Q4 2011’ timeframe. News on pricing and exact availability as and when we get it.
Leave a Reply