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Sony Ericsson has introduced two new handsets, the W710 and W850, as members of its every burgeoning line of Walkman music phones. The W710 is a sports-orientated handset built in the mode of Nokia's new 5500, while the W850 is the first Walkman phone to feature a slider design.

The sporty W710 includes a motion sensor plus new fitness applications that measure your running speed, distance and time, or simply count your steps when walking. A jogging application can be accessed from both the sub display and main display to measure both speed and distance covered. There's also a daily step counter that resets automatically at midnight, and your progress is displayed even when the phone is on standby.

The Walkman 2.0 music player on the phone comes with Mega Bass and allows you to search and sort by artist, album, track and playlist. There’s an FM radio, which can be recorded on the phone to the bundled Memory Stick Micro card (expandable up to 1 GB).

You can also discover information about a track through the new Gracenote Mobile MusicID service. Simply record a few seconds either via the microphone or FM radio and then with send that clip to a music database to identify it.

The quad-band GSM/EDGE phone also includes a 2.0-megapixel camera, 10 MB of memory, a 176 x 220 pixel (262k color) main display, 128 x 128 pixel external screen, and Bluetooth. It ships with a stereo headset and should be available during the third quarter.

Sony Ericsson's W850 offers the same version of the Walkman music player as the W710 and delivers the Gracenote MusicID service as well. You slide the QVGA (240 x 320 pixel), 260k display up to reveal the keypad.

The company says it is configured for operator over the air (OTA) music download services and comes with a 1 GB Memory Stick PRO Duo card, expandable up to 4 GB. It offers an FM radio as well, 2-megapixel camera, and Bluetooth with A2DP stereo audio support.

This one should ship in the 3rd quarter as well, but doesn't appear headed for the Americas like the other new model. As with the W710, pricing hasn't been divulged yet.

The Japanese-Swedish collaboration is particularly bullish on its Walkman models, as they've proven to be a boon to the company; coming (or soon to be) in all shapes, sizes, prices and capacities, up to 4 GB with the W950i.

Over the course of last seven months, Sony Ericsson said it shipped 5.5 million Walkman phones alone, giving much credit to these handsets for helping it more than triple net profits last quarter to $131.9 million (year-over-year) and increasing sales by 55 percent to 9.4 million.