Sony Ericsson has partnered with Ducati, the Italian motorcycle manufacturer, in order to soon release a Sony Ericsson Ducati mobile phone. The handset seems to be a special edition of the Z770 clamshell, first announced by the Swedish-Japanese company back in February and already available on the market.

Coming to give some "mobile velocity", as the Italian Newsmobile website says, the Ducati phone has a feature list and a design similar to Z770 - that's why we think it's a new edition of the latter. Anyway, the extras that it brigs include a Ducati-themed case, an HBH DS 220 Ducati Bluetooth headset, plus videos, screensavers and other content related to Ducati.

One of Ducati's directors says the company has been thinking of branding a mobile phone for quite a while. So it seems that from all the handset manufacturers they liked Sony Ericsson best, otherwise now we would have had a Nokia Ducati or a Motorola Ducati.

Aside from the tri-band GSM connectivity that about all mobile phones have, the Ducati handset also brings HSDPA connectivity (2100 MHz), offering data transfer speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps. Its other features include: a 2.2 inch TFT main internal display with 256K colors and 240 x 320 pixels, NetFront 3.4 Web browser, email, Instant Messaging, RSS reader, Music player, FM radio with RDS, TrackID, USB 2.0 and 32MB of expandable memory - all in a case that measures 93 x 48 x 16 millimeters (when closed) and weighs 91 grams.

The price for the bike-themed clamshell was not set yet but, starting June 2008, Italian users will be able to get the phone from TIM, the largest mobile operator in Italy. For the moment there are no details about the future availability of the phone on other markets except the Italian one.

Based in Bologna, Italy, Ducati has been producing motorcycles for more than 50 years and is now one of the most renowned brands in the industry. No wonder it decided to "make" its own phone now, as more and more famous auto and moto companies do this lately.