Sony reveal new Mix Walkman "karaoke phone"

It’s not often we get to categorise a handset as a “karaoke phone”, but that’s just what we’re going to do this morning with Sony Ericsson’s novel new Mix Walkmen phone.

That’s because among its music-orientated features are a karaoke function, dropping the vocal track on tunes played from the phone so that you can sing over the backing track, as well as an interesting new feature we’ve not seen anywhere else before called “Zappin”, which identifies the next song in a playlist’s chorus and gives you a quick snippet of it to help you see whether or not you want to jump to it.

In terms of its more broad specifications, the Mix Walkman has a 3.5 mm headphone jack, Bluetooth and FM radio with RDS support, a micro-USB port, Wi-Fi and 100MB of built in memory, expandable up to 32GB with a microSD card.

The camera on the rear takes 3.2MP snaps, while you can also grab multi-coloured bands with which to customise the phone’s shell.

Expect to see this one in shops by the Autumn.