14 DAY TRIAL // Sony Ericsson W980, the high-end Walkman handset announced by the Swedish-Japanese company back in February, is no longer in the "coming soon" section of Sony Ericsson's official website. This means the handset should be commercially available in the next days, although Sony Ericsson has not made any announcement regarding the new Walkman phone.
The W980 is clamshell and, judging by its list of features, it's the most advanced Walkman handset to come in this form factor. First of all, the new W980 comes with an unusual internal memory for a flip phone: 8 GB. There's no microSD card support, but 8GB is quite enough for about anything you might want to store in the phone.
Besides the generous memory, the W980 also brings the following: quad-band GSM connectivity as well as HSDPA, a 2.2 inch TFT main display with 256K colors and a QVGA resolution (240 x 320 pixels), an external 176 x 176 pixel screen, dedicated music keys, high quality stereo speakers, Walkman Player 3.0, shake control, FM radio and FM transmitter, stereo Bluetooth with A2DP, video streaming and video player, a 3.15 Megapixel camera with flash, email, NetFront browser, RSS reader, 3D games and USB.
Sony Ericsson W980 weighs exactly 100 grams and, when not flipped, it measures 92 x 46 x 16.9 millimeters. The battery included in the music clamshell is a 930 mAh one which should (theoretically) be able to provide up to 9 hours in talk-time mode, up to 20 hours of music playback or up to 370 hours of stand-by time.
Most probably, the Walkman clamshell will first be available across Europe, with a US release to follow (the FCC has already approved the handset, about three weeks ago, thus the road to US is open). The retail price of W980 is not known for the moment.
