The hype surrounding Motorola’s Rockr has hidden the fact that Sony Ericsson has announced its second Walkman handset – the W550i.
Unlike the W800i which is a candy bar handset, the W550i is a swivel phone. So you turn its face and it then looks like a clamshell phone. This particular model seems to be a re-jig of the previously announced S600 handset.
The major difference being that it features Sony’s Walkman media player and MegaBass stereo speakers. Once again there’s no support for stereo Bluetooth headsets – you have to use the wired variety (which are supplied with the handset). It took a lot of digging to discover its storage cpacity (circa 80 tunes)but apparently the W550i will be shipped with only 256 MB of memory compared to the 512 MB of its bigger brother.
Another interesting feature is that the built-in FM radio also supports RDS so you can receive the data messages broadcast by regular FM stations. There’s still no pricing and promised availability date, though.
