WHETHER it’s video recorders or computers, MP3 players or text-messaging, children tend to get to grips with new technology much faster than their parents.

As it is with people, so it shall be with companies. That’s one message from the booming sales reported last week by Sony Ericsson, the London-based mobile-phone company that is the jointly owned offspring of Sony of Japan and Ericsson of Sweden.

The handset maker enjoyed a terrific second quarter, with a 41% year-on-year increase in sales to nearly €2.3 billion (£1.6 billion). Leading the charge was the company’s range of Walkman music phones, introduced less than a year ago but already selling at a rate of more than 1m a month.

One in four of the handsets that Sony Ericsson now sells is also a digital music player that carries the Walkman logo.

A brand that only a year ago was looking tired and flat-footed is staging a revival, attracting a new generation of young consumers. “They’ve done a good job in resurrecting the Walkman brand,” said Richard Windsor, analyst at Nomura International.

Jim Slater, marketing director of Phones4u, the mobile retailer, agrees. “Walkman appeared to be a tired 1970s icon that was in hibernation,” he said. “The Walkman phones have combined functionality with style, and have been a great success with the youth audience that we specialise in.”

The tarnishing of the Walkman brand was one of the most potent symbols of Sony’s problems in recent years. Sony invented music on the move with the original cassette player back in 1979; the Walkman name was the idea of Akio Morita, co-founder of the electronics giant.

As tapes gave way to CDs, and as CDs were joined by the Minidisc, Sony sold more than 350m Walkmans. But then the digital age began — and suddenly the music stopped.

After Apple launched the Ipod in 2001, Sony meekly surrendered its leadership of the mobile-music market, making error after error. It tried to push a proprietary music-file format, ignoring the widespread availability of songs coded as MP3s; its digital playing and recording rights were over-restrictive; and its software was clunky and difficult to use.

And although Sony launched product after product, none of its digital Walkman devices came close to matching the Ipod for must-have appeal.

Faced with this embarrassing situation, Sony last year decided to license the Walkman brand to its independently managed subsidiary, Sony Ericsson. Formed from a merger in 2001, the joint-venture company had made good progress in turning round a previously troubled business, and establishing a reputation for well-designed phones.

The first Walkman handset, the orange-and-white W800i, was launched last August with software that allowed consumers to “rip” their own CDs to the phone’s memory card. This was not just a device to encourage network operators’ sales of over-the-air song downloads.

The Walkman phones were an immediate hit with consumers. Sony Ericsson has now sold about 9.5m Walkman handsets, at a time when there are the first signs that the Ipod’s appeal may be faltering.

Steve Walker, vice-president for product marketing at Sony Ericsson, said: “Nobody really knew how successful this was going to be. It has surpassed even our wildest dreams.”

Many phones are capable of being used as digital music players, but few customers use them as such. The challenge, said Walker, was to persuade consumers that a phone could be a credible music device, “and the best way to do that was to write ‘Walkman’ on the phone”.

It’s not quite that simple. Sony Ericsson thought carefully about what else was needed to get consumers to use their phones as music players. So Walkman phones come with software to convert CDs into music files, a decent amount of memory to store songs, and good-quality headphones.

“I don’t think all our competitors are providing that full package,” said Walker.

There are now six different Walkman phones, with three more coming soon. The new ones include the W950, a slim 3G phone that has a 4 gigabyte memory — the same capacity as the 1,000-song Ipod nano.

The cherished Walkman heritage meant that the relationship with Sony Ericsson was not one that Sony entered into lightly.But success of the Walkman phones “has given Sony a lot of confidence,” Walker said.

One sign of that is that Sony Ericsson has just launched its first Cyber-shot camera phone, the K800i. This has a 3.2 megapixel camera, with autofocus and xenon flash.

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