It seems like just yesterday I was but a wee young’in with badly dubbed tapes that kept getting chewed up in my Sony Walkman. Well, that’s not going to happen any more, the Sony Walkman has gone digital! The Sony Ericsson W800 mobile phone is a feature packed MP3 player, 2.0 megapixel camera offering 30 hours of battery life for MP3 playback.

”We looked carefully at what people want from a mobile digital music player and have designed a product that fits the bill,” says Rikko Sakaguchi, Senior Vice President, Product and Application Planning of Sony Ericsson. “The W800 has great sound quality, is easy to use, has superb battery life and can store a large amount of music. It’s an attractive, desirable device that combines high quality phone, camera, music and games player.”

Here is Sony’s original WM1 Walkman from 1979. Although Sony isn’t the first to integrate audio playback in a mobile phone, they do have the rights to the “Walkman” name, so they can make a big fuss about it.

The new W800 Walkman will come with a 512MB Memory Stick Duo which should be able to store around 150 tracks, or 10-12 full CDs. Both AAC and MP3 music formats are supported. They can be transfered to the W800 via Sony’s Disk2Phone software (and most likely, knowing Sony and all, only with Disk2Phone software). No word on if the phone will work as a file storage medium, but I expect it will. The 2 megapixel camera will sport autofocus, picture light, active lens cover and digital still camera interface. When the phone function is switched on expect around 15 hours of battery life, when the phone function is turned off expect 30 hours of pure music listening; pretty sweet if you ask me.

Sony seems to be trying to bring back the Walkman name with their new phones; it definitely feels like the early 80’s all over again!