Sony Ericsson today Liberacéd up its Walkman music phone line, adding a new W700 candybar model kitted out in a "titanium gold"-coloured casing. Sony Ericsson maintains the new hue is "subtle" and the phone's look "discreet", but we'd say it's more Nescafé Gold Blend than Lavazza espresso.

The W700 comes bundled with a 256MB MemoryStick Pro Duo card for music storage and supports AAC and MP3 file formats. The sound can be tweaked with the graphic equaliser app and Sony's MegaBass system. The handset uses USB Mass Storage to allow you to drag and drop tracks from a computer, or you can run the company's Disc2Phone ripping app.

Sony Ericsson has added a flight mode to the phone, allowing users to turn off the W700's radio and continue to listen to music when airborne. The company said the handset's battery will run for 30 hours while the W700 plays music, and we suspect that's with the radio turned off.

As a phone, the W700 has a tri-band (900/1800/1900MHz) GSM/GPRS radio and Bluetooth 2.0. It sports a two megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom and LED light. The screen's a 1.8in, 176 x 220, 262,144-colour job.

A separate version of the W700, the W700c, will be pitched at the China market, and some territories will get a white incarnation of the phone. All of them will ship in Q2, Sony Ericsson said. ®

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