Word on the street (on the Web, actually) is that Sony Ericsson is preparing a new high-end touchscreen Walkman smartphone that will come with a huge internal memory of 16GB. This new handset should replace the W960, which was released at the end of 2007 as the follower of the old W950 - the first touchscreen Walkman smartphone.

Except for the 16GB of internal memory, there are no other details about the new smartphone. The Unofficial Sony Ericsson Blog, where the info about the mysterious Walkman appeared, says that the new device will surely be part of SE's future line-up of high-end phones, together with the 8.1 Megapixel C905 and an unannounced business-oriented handset code-named Hecaro.

Were we to think logically, the new Walkman smartphone should be called Sony Ericsson W970, but we don't know this for sure. Moreover, since the Swedish-Japanese company has already unveiled the W980, which is a clamshell that doesn't have too much in common with the W950 and W960 models (save for the music-oriented features), the new Sony Ericsson Walkman flagship might actually not have a name that starts with "W9" and it could be a handset dubbed in a similar way to Xperia X1 - hence a name with less digits or even digit-free.

Anyway, the name is less important. What really matters is that sometime in the future we'll have a Sony Ericsson that will (apparently) be a threat to Apple's iPhone 3G and all the other touchscreen handsets to come in 2008.

Until more (and hopefully official) details about the new 16GB Walkman smartphone emerge, feel free to check out Sony Ericsson W960's review made by Softpedia just before last Christmas. While browsing through the detailed analysis of the handset, you can form an idea of what to expect from the new W-series smarpthone.