At the same event in which Nokia had announced new phones Sony Ericsson has said that early next month, will unveil the hybrid of a mobile phone and a digital music player, and the name they chose for this gadget should ring a bell to practically everybody who's not technologically inept for it's called: Walkman.

That's what remembering about your roots is all about, since this name can be associated with Sony for the past 25 years, starting with the 350mn music players.

The 2005 phone version of the Walkman will play open music file formats such as MP3 and AAC. One of the main concerns for the manufacturer was to come up with an easy way to browse, select and play music, and sound quality is also a major issue not to be overlooked.

The company didn't mention any other details, but assumptions can be made even from what we do know. The phone won't be expected to hold an entire music collection. It was designed with the idea of a car stereo replacement, which means it should be able to store the equivalent of six to ten CDs.

That translates into about 750 MB of music files at typical data rates for compressed digital music files and assuming the CDs contained between 40 and 75 minutes of music.

Most likely, people will rip their own CDs and copy them to the phone, but Sony Ericsson will also work with Sony's Connect online music store to provide a music download service for the phone.

Future phones from competitor cell phone producer Nokia will include the ability to play files in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. Sony Ericsson did not say whether it has plans to add support for such proprietary music formats.