At an event held in the Imagination Gallery in London today, Sendo previewed the company's upcoming Series 60 smartphone - the Sendo X. Editor-in-Chief Jørgen Sundgot was present, and got to spend hands-on time with the device that - when it hits shelves - will be the most powerful Series 60 smartphone on the market, bar none. Sendo itself expects to sell in the range of one million smartphones during 2004, but the question everyone's asking is this: can a manufacturer that's brand new to smartphones pull off a decent first-generation product?
To be entirely accurate, the Sendo X is actually not Sendo's first smartphone, but rather the second - the Smartphone 2002 powered Z100, long since dumped, represented the very first crack the company made at a more advanced device. According to Sendo itself, the company has had Series 60 running on its hardware since January, and contrary to what one might believe it does indeed seem as if though the manufacturer is about to pull off the brilliant stunt of delivering a device that rivals - and perhaps even surpasses - the very cream of its competitors.
Heavily modified by Sendo, the X runs Series 60 version 1.2s atop Symbian OS 6.0. Comparatively, the Nokia 6600 runs atop newer software, but one would be hard pressed to tell the difference as the X boasts support for just about every word in the acronym soup in which mobile devices bathe, including support for a vast range of audio and video formats. The pre-release version infoSync gained access to did exhibit odd behaviour at times, but not only was it a pre-release version but also running trace software for debugging processes. Primed for customization, the display offers an extra 12 pixels at the top which at all times display system indicators for new messages, signal reception, battery level and more. Despite this, the X is fully compatible with other Series 60 applications as long as these are coded according to proper guidelines.
Sendo X
Courtesy of the special GraphiX coprocessor of the Sendo X, its neatly designed user interface flows very smoothly and is a joy to use. This also affects the viewfinder application for the built-in camera, which flows amazingly smoothly compared to anything else on the market. Picture quality could be better, however, particularly under poorly lit conditions - although several snazzy features such as a flash and anti red-eye cranks the overall impression of this up several notches. Unfortunately, video recording could not be demonstrated due to the trace software running in the background, but if it's anything like the other aspects demonstrated, the X could very well leave other manufacturers embarassed. According to Sendo, the X should in its final state be able of recording video with audio at 15 fps, and utilize up to 90% of available memory, whether internal or a storage card.
The hardware design of the unit is also incredibly slick, and compared to Nokia's 6600 it appears much smaller - which it also is, but the design emphasises this. In fact, one might go as far as saying the X is the first truly pocketable Series 60 smartphone. Its keypad offers excellent tactile feedback and is well laid out, while an extra hardware button on the right side of the unit activates the speaker-independent voice recognition of the phone. Using this, users will be able to look up and dial contacts as well as open applications present in the main menu of the phone - and since it is based on phonetic recognition, no training will be required.
Another partcularly nice touch of the Sendo X is its ability to utilize - and hot-swap - not only MMC memory cards but also SD memory cards. Granted, the device does not support SDIO at the current point in time, but Sendo said that the company has a solution which could be integrated into future products should it wish to do so.
To round this preview up, it's suffice to say that the Sendo X shows great potential, and that we immensely look forward to reviewing the commercial version. Availability and pricing for the UK market has yet to be announced, but according to Sendo CEO Hugh Brogan, an unsubzidised version will sell for approximately 500 EUR in the German market when it hits shelves there - some time during the first quarter of 2004.
We'll leave the final words to Sendo's Ron Schaeffer, who expressed himself better than most people when commenting on Sendo's bundle of MMS templates for the X: "We think that if you can make people look stupid in a picture, you're more likely to send it as a MMS." Needless to say, we agree.
