Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications will take the 25-year-old Walkman into uncharted territory by launching a Walkman-branded mobile phone in March.

"The Walkman showed us that people of every generation love listening to music while on the move, and we believe the mobile phone is the perfect device to extend the world of digital mobile music to a far wider audience," Miles Flint, President of Swedish-Japanese Sony-Ericsson said here.

The Sony-Ericsson announcement came hard on the heels of earlier news here from the world's largest cellphone maker Nokia that it had struck a deal with software giant Microsoft and US-music download service Loudeye to make it easier for music fans to browse, buy and download digital music and ringtones on-line and play them on their Nokia handsets.