The mobile phone industry has been arguing for years that the stand-alone music player market was doomed by the converged MP3-playing handset market (I think there are markets for both), but that sometimes seemed like hubris as people pointed out the difficulty of playing music on mobile phones, poor battery life and so on. However, the Sunday Times reports that some sales results are beginning to support this view… Sony Ericsson sold 17 million Walkman phones last year, bringing it to more than 20 million since the line was introduced 18 months ago, which is an even quicker uptake than Apple managed with the iPod. Sony Ericsson has sold a further 43 million music playing phones without the Walkman brand, but it can be argued that the music capabilities on these handsets are incidental and not everyone uses them. The same applies to most Nokia music-capable handsets, of which the company shipped 70 million last year…although Nokia claims that more than 60 percent of people use their phones’ music-playing capabilities