Sony Ericsson announced back in November 2007 the release of its W380i music phone, planned for the first months of 2008. Since we're exactly in the first month, the handset is not available yet but, based on recently surfaced details, it will hit the market pretty soon.

Initially said to come in two color options, Magnetic Grey and Electric Purple, Sony Ericsson W380 will also be sold in Black Champaigne, which is just a normal black with an imperious name. However, black is always nice, especially in this pre-Valentine's Day period when red and pink handsets come one after another.

The tri-band GSM Sony Ericsson packs, first of all, nice music features - obviously, as it is a Walkman series phone. The handset offers Media Player, stereo Bluetooth with A2DP, TrackID, MegaBass, Flight mode, FM radio with RDS, Polyphonic ringtones and PlayNow for fast and easy MP3 downloads. Another worthy aspect about W380i is its gesture control feature that allows users to control several functions without touching the phone: simply wave your hand in front of it to mute incoming calls or activate the alarm clock.

Weighing 100 grams and measuring 92 x 49 x 16 millimeters, Sony Ericsson W380i is a clamshell handset that packs an internal 1.9 inch 176 x 220 pixels main display and an external OLED one at 36 x 128 pixels. The latter is sleekly integrated into the phone's case and allows you to control its music player. Other features of W380i include a 1.3 Megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom (not really great) and memory expansion slot.

The music clamshell will be available in Europe, U.S. (as Sony Ericsson W380a) and China (as Sony Ericsson W380c). A retail price has not been revealed yet and unfortunately we don't have magical powers to guess it.