Sony Ericsson, after saying that it would no longer use its older Walkman and Cybershot brands, has made it completely clear that two new phones, the Zylo and Spiro, out this week, carry the features of a Walkman phone indicated by the ‘with Walkman’ moniker. They also feature a brand new music format which is deemed to be HD.
Both are targeted as entry level Walkmans, though no pricing has been given out, and they both also feature strong social networking interaction.
The Zylo with Walkman allows music to play in the background while talking to a friend, a new form of music sharing says Sony Ericsson, a trick which also allows you to select pre-loaded sounds such as ‘work’ sounds, so you can pretend you are still at work.
The new HD audio format is called FLAC, which the company says is the best sound quality ever on a mobile phone. We would not be too surprised at this, Sony Ericsson makes the best music phones in the world, bar none, including the iPhone. The sound quality alone is enough but when you add TrackID (your phone can listen to a track and identify it and purchase it) and PlayNow arena (music store) and SenseMe (a clustering piece of software that puts music of the same mood in an automatic playlist, then you have a fabulous phone audio experience. The Zylo also has ‘shake’ control for flicking the device to change tracks.
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec and an encoder for it has been deployed before on the Sony PS3 gaming console and a decoder has been sold for a while as a plug in to Sony Ericsson phones.
The new phones both come with direct home page connections to Facebook, Twitter and the Zylo also has them to Flickr, Picasa and YouTube, making them all two clicks away. The Spiro comes with a bulk standard 3.5 mm earphones jack socket.
“The Sony Ericsson range of Walkman phones has seen tremendous success since it was first launched in 2005 having sold more than 130 million handsets to date – and we are still seeing a great appetite from consumers. Today’s announcement aims to satisfy this demand by making the Walkman phone range available to a wider audience.” Said Jenny Maltesson, Marketing Business Manager at Sony Ericsson.
The Spiro is a 2G phone with a 2 megapixel camera, the Obigo Q7 web browser, a 2.2 inch colour QVGA screen and is available in selected in Q3 in Black, Pink and Green. The Zylo is a 3G phone, has a 3.2 megapixel camera which takes video, the Access Netfront web browser, a 2.6 inch QVGA color screen and is also available in Q3 in Black, Silver and Pink.