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CANNES, France, Feb 14 (AFP) - Giant mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson will launch high-quality digital Walkman mobile phones in March to benefit from the surge in the mobile music business, which it expects to be a major growth area in 2005.
"The Walkman showed us that people of every generation love listening to music while on the move, and we believe the mobile phone is the perfect device to extend the world of digital mobile music to a far wider audience," Miles Flint, President of Swedish-Japanese Sony-Ericsson, said here.
Sony has sold over 340 million Walkman music players globally in over 25 years, "illustrating the mass appeal of mobile music," Flint told a press conference on the opening day of the influential mobile phone 3GSM World Congress.
The Sony-Ericsson announcement came hard on the heels of news here from the world's largest cellphone maker Nokia that it has struck a deal with software giant Microsoft and US-music download service Loudeye to make it easier for music fans to browse, buy and download digital music and ringtones on-line and play it on their Nokia handsets.
The slew of announcements made by Sony-Ericsson, Nokia and other phone makers and operators on the opening day of the four-day 3GSM World Congress here underlined how the industry believes mobile music will be a key growth area this year.
"Entertainment and especially music" will be a major opportunity for growth, Flint told the press conference.
"It's a good business opportunity for us," he told journalists after the conference. The company has already had a "very positive reaction from operators", Flint said, adding that it was still too early to announce any deals.
Prototypes of the new Walkman cellphone handsets will be unveiled in a few weeks time in March, he said.
A key feature of the new Walkman-branded phones will be that they will support the most popular digital music file formats and services, Sony-Ericsson underlined. "Connectivity and ease of use are the most important things," Flint said.
This will make the Sony-Ericsson Walkmans the first mobile phones to use open software standards. Incompatibility between some of the fast-growing models of digital music players on the market, on-line music stores and computers is proving to be the main hitch in the blossoming mobile music market.
Sony-Ericsson plans to avoid these incompatibility issues by "supporting open music standards," Flint stressed. This means that users will have much more choice about where to buy their music online and also be able to play their music on many more devices.
Asked whether Sony-Ericsson was in discussions with Microsoft to make the new phone compatible with Microsoft Windows Media Player, Flint said the company is "talking to many people about potential partnerships" without specifying which companies.
The firm also announced it will collaborate with Sony's music digital Connect online music service to enable users to use the service, which is already available in the United States, the United kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and which is expanding rapidly.
Whilst the Walkman phones will initially enable music fans to transfer their existing CD collections to their phones via a PC, future handsets will be capable of playing music bought and downloaded via a PC from the Internet or direct to the phone.
