Sony Ericsson has drawn first blood at MWC 2009 with the announcement of the Sony Ericsson W995. This is a monster of a multimedia phone that combines the best of both the Sony Ericsson CyebrShot and Walkman range.

It’s actually a Walkman phone, in the sense that it features the legendary Walkman branding and Walkman software (not to mention the superb Walkman sound quality), but rather than limit the W995 just to music capabilities, Sony Ericsson has decided to throw everything it’s got at the phone, and so the feature list is huge!

More details of the Sony Ericsson W995 after the jump.

Sony Ericsson W995 overview

The Sony Ericsson W995 is the first phone in a new initiative from the company called Entertainment Unlimited, which focuses on convergence (e.g. the W995 converges the Walkman phones with the CyebrShot phones), ubiquity (embedding Sony and Sony Ericsson devices everywhere in your home, with content freely being shareable between all the devices) and sharing between online Web applications and Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow.

All very nice, but what about the phone? Well, as I said, the Sony Ericsson W995 converges the Walkman brand with the CyberShot brand, and so as well as a Walkman player and software, it alos comes with an 8 megapixel CyberShot camera, image and video stabilization, face detection, picture and video blogging.

The Walkman player also comes with Clear Stereo and Clear Bass audio enhancement technologies, and, for the first time for a Walkman phone, a 3.5mm headphone jack.

To show off the multimedia capabilities of the W995, there’s even a dedicated YouTube player that lets you stream videos direct from YouTube (which, I assume, means the phone supports HSDPA).

There’s even aGPS for location-based services, Wi-Fi connectivity, DLNA for sharing your content between other devices, FM radio and 8GB of onboard storage – I told you this phone had everything!

In fact, the only thing it doesn’t have is a touchscreen. Indeed, the screen itself is pretty poor – just 2.6 inches with a 262,000 colour display, which is a bit of a let-down for such a multimedia-rich phone.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the W995, though, is the new MediaGo software. This lets you find and synchronize multimedia content between your phone and your other devices seamlessly, and convert your videos automatically so that they play on your phone in the best resolution for the device.

“With Media Go there’s no need to worry about format, resolution and ‘frame per second’ anymore,” said Sony Ericsson’s Alexandre Cardon. “No longer will the video you transferred from your PC to your phone play in low resolution or bad quality. With Media Go and the W995 the experience is as good on your phone as it was on your PC,” he continued.

The Sony Ericsson W995 is a cracking start to MWC, and a cracking phone from Sony Ericsson. These are all the details we have on it at the moment, but we should be able to give you much more form tomorrow.

[Source: Sense.net]