Sony Ericsson Live With Walkman WT19i

Well, that’s it. The iPhone has finally leveled the playing field. There’s no longer any need to carry a digital camera, MP3 player, or e-reader separately—now your mobile phone does it all, just as well or even better. Only portable game consoles managed to hold their ground, and serious attempts by smartphones to invade that niche only began recently.

There’s no longer a need to highlight music as a separate function, because every smartphone comes with it by default. That’s exactly why the model WT19i, also known as Live with Walkman, became the swan song of the Walkman brand in the GSM terminal world—marking the sunset of the entire category of music-oriented phones. In the next iOS release, Apple will rename the iPod app—a brand that defined a whole digital era—to the generic “Music”, and Sony will do the same with the Walkman app after its split with Ericsson. The original Walkman player will still remain, but only for the dedicated line of hardware players, which now belong to a completely different world, made for true audiophiles.

You might expect the final note to be something grand and impressive—but it wasn’t. The last music-centric phone in history was built on the budget Xperia X8 chassis, the included headphones were the cheapest possible, and the music app was less capable than third-party alternatives like PowerAmp. There were no fancy DACs, no oxygen-free soldering—everything was utterly ordinary. The Walkman name here was just a brand, an image with little substance behind it.

But I still needed this device in my collection, to cement one beautiful fact in history: music phones were real—and they were awesome! They’ll forever have a place in my heart. So much so that even now, I try to recreate that vibe in some way: I store my music locally, still prefer wired headphones, ideally with an inline remote, and even contributed a Sony-themed skin to my favorite open-source music player. This all means a lot to me—and I’ll do my best to preserve it in some form for the next generations.

All photos from Vintage Cellphone and PDA Museum by TiredSysadmin are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.