Mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson unveiled on Tuesday a new model of their Walkman phone. The W950, a purple 3G phone with an orange backlight and 4 gigabytes of flash memory storage capacity to hold thousands of songs, provides the same storage as Apple Computer's iPod Nano MP3 music players. The device due to launch before the end of this year, will be priced between 300 and 400 euros (US$357-476).

This is the sixth walkman model to be introduced by Japanese-Swedish joint venture Sony Ericsson, which was the world's fifth-biggest handset maker in 2005.

"Bringing the Walkman brand to Sony Ericsson phones was one of our achievements in 2005 and we have now sold more than 3 million Walkman phones," Sony Ericsson President Miles Flint said in a statement.

"This certainly ups the ante in the battle between Apple and the phone makers for mobile music," said analyst Ben Wood at market research group Gartner.