The Japanese carrier KDDI has just announced the Sony Ericsson Walkman Xmini phone to be realeased in Japan at the end of December. It measures 44 x 75 x 18mm (when closed) and features a 1.8-inch LCD display with 4GB of built-in memory. The Xmini can hold up to 2,300 songs from EZ “Chaku Uta Full”, KDDI’s mobile music download service.

When it’s closed, it looks like a regular Walkman music player and music controls appear under the display screen. When you slide it open, an alphanumeric keypad is revealed to give you normal cell phone capabilities. There is no information yet on whether the phone will be available in other countries.

Ericsson has big plans for cell phones – big plans. Ultimately by the 2012, the company sees 100+ Mbps connection with 12-20MP cameras as you can see by the chart above. Plus, your lowly phone will be able to record HD video and sport a 1GHz CPU. So in less than four years all this is suppose to happen, Ericsson? M’kay. The megapixal camera is within reason, and even the HD video part doesn’t seem that wacky within four years, but while Euro snobs and Japanese tech geeks might see the fast data speeds, chances are we here in the States will not see those quick speeds before flying cars.

We kind of knew these two Sony Ericsson products were dropping today, and so, here are the Sony W705 Walkman phone and MBS-900 Bluetooth speaker. The quad-band W705 seems like an upgraded G705 with WiFi, YouTube access, 3.2 MP camera, and a FM radio with TrackID built-in. Plus, it has a large 2.4-inch screen along with an accelerometer for Shake Control. The whole thing is made out of a metal finish that should help this slider stand out.

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Ericsson’s Chief Marketing Officer, Johan Bergendahl, said earlier today that he believes wireless broadband, known here as 3G, WiMAX, or a variety of other acronyms, will soon replace Wi-Fi as the de-facto wireless standard.

And he’s right.

Laptops are outselling desktops at a decent clip, and handsets are getting more and more powerful, with bigger, higher-resolution screens. The combination means we’re more mobile than ever, and that requires connectivity. Unless some big providers really step up their implementations, Wi-Fi will indeed go the way of the landline phone: It’ll never go away completely, but it won’t be our primary communications channel.

Ericsson predicts demise of hotspots [Infoworld]

Sony Ericsson has just released two new phones which we will NEVER see in the U.S. The w960 (pictured right) comes packed with powerful features such as WiFi, a 240×320 touch screen for browsing media, 3.2 megapixel camera, and 8GB of storage.

The red w910 features a cool playback mode in which it plays music based on your mood. This feature will obviously be of no use to those in the emo crowd. One of the more useless features however, is being able to shake the phone to access the music store. A cool feature if you like pulling your phone out of a bag and having a few new Avril Lavigne albums.

Press release [SonyEricsson]

After covering Motorola’s multi-layer LCD solar display, Ericsson’s recently issued patent adds a feature in yet another direction: a multiple layered display. Ericsson has thought up a number of applications to fit more onto that tiny screen by layering the information.

Apple may be the company to do something like this justice, and after the jump you’ll see just how much work has already been done.

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This week, Ericsson received a wireless printer-pen patent that can transfer hand writing to electronic text to send emails and receives content and can print it to special paper taking into account the position of the pen on the paper.

With all this typing, is there still room for writing instrument innovation? After a few seconds of thinking, our answer is yes.

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