Sony Ericsson went ahead an announced the "W800" today, the first mobile phone to be sold under the "Walkman" brand. Here's the press release in English, and there are plenty of pictures available here.In other news, I've been working o­n a sort of side project that I'll be publicizing before the end of the week. That's why there hasn't been too much news since last week.

Update: Also forgot to mention that while Sony Ericsson announced a fleet of other new handsets today, we here at TechJapan officially don't care about any of them except the Walkman o­ne.

I don't know where this o­ne came from, but a number of news agencies (Joystiq, Eurogamer) are reporting that a German site claims the PSX homepage states that production of the units has stopped.

Well, we here at TechJapan have some insight into this matter. Here's the official PSX homepage right here, and it says NOTHING about PSX production being halted.

Following o­n from their withdrawal of overseas markets, Sony has announced that it will not release any new CLIE PDAs and will end production of all models in July. Looks like the booming popularity and expanding functionality of mobile phones was just too much for the CLIE to handle. Such is the cut-throat world of consumer electronics.

UPDATE: According to this article, though Sony is giving up o­n the Clie brand, they are not getting out of the PDA industry.

Sony has confirmed that the controller buttons on some Playstation Portable (PSP) units may become stuck and not return to their default position. A free repair program has been announced.

Holy crapola! Engadget dropped a link today to MiniDisc.org, which in turn links to this post o­n a Dutch MiniDisc message board, that describes three of Sony's next Hi-MD players as featuring MP3 playback.

If this turns out to be true, I'm in the market for a new MP3 player. Hi-MDs offer 1GB capacities, and cost about $5 USD. Given Hi-MD's compatibility with the USB Storage Class, all will be dandy.

We'll be covering this when an official announcement comes from Sony.

Most people ignored Sony's line of "Net Juke" network audio players, because of their inability to play MP3.

Well, stop ignoring them please. Announced by Sony today was the "NAS-A10," which has a bunch of interesting features...but the most important of which is support for the MP3 format. So how do you get MP3s to it? Memory Stick, Ethernet, or CD. It also has a 40GB hard drive, so you can easily rip songs to it from your library. It's even got a composite output for viewing stuff o­n your TV. MP3 support o­n the device could use some work -- there appears to be no MP3 support to/from the hard drive, and nothing with the USB 2.0 interface the unit is equipped with.

In the Sony Electronics pricing tradition, however, it's over $600 USD.

We reported o­n Sony's Vaio notebook under 100,000 yen not too long ago, and apparently, it has already sold out. Oops!

Sony has developed a hybrid lithium-ion rechargeable battery, the "Nexelion", which has a 30% higher capacity than the company's previous models. The new battery will be released as a Handycam battery pack in Spring 2005.

Now here's an interesting development from Sony: the LF-X5 "LocationFree TV" not o­nly offers a wireless TV solution from within the home, but you can even access the same TV signals from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

If, for example, you'd like to watch Japanese TV from the comfort of your American home, just buy o­ne of these TVs, get a buddy in Japan to setup the base station for you, and you're good to go.

I've got three Sony articles tonight, so I may as well put them in order.

Our second article is about the "VAIO type B," or "the first Vaio notebook under 100,000 yen." For us Americans, it's not a huge deal; I'm sure you could find o­ne for like $999 at Best Buy. Sony must have looked at their dwindling market share and decided to make a move.