Sendo X is the first Symbian OS based smartphone from British Sendo company. 1,5 years ago Sendo decided to cancel an almost ready Microsoft Smartphone project and switch to the Series 60 platform. The result was worth waiting for.

1. Hardware

Unlike most of other Series 60 based smartphones, the Sendo X really looks like a smartphone. No strange shapes, no extravagant keypads - everything on its place.

The X weighs 120 g. It is of the same length as Nokia 7610 (110 mm) but it is narrower (48 mm). As opposed to its small length and width, the X is quite thick (23 mm) - still thinner than e.g. 7650 but because other dimensions are so small, the thickness of Sendo X is more apparent.

As mentioned, Sendo X is equipped with a conventionally looking keypad - all keys can be found where you'd suppose them to be. Joypad consists of two separate elements - a four-way ring for direction and a 'fire' button in the middle of it. The X also has two hardware buttons located on both sides of the phone: Voice dialling/voice commands button on the right side and an Edit key (text input options, marking items) on the left side.

Sendo X - similiarily to the Siemens SX1 - has a 176x220 pixel screen, i.e. 12 pixels higher than a typical Series 60 display. These additional lines show status bar with battery, network, Bluetooth, IR etc. indicators and they are visible all the time, with all system menus and applications taking the usual 176x208 area below. The screen supports 65k colors (16-bit palette) and is bright and crisp, with brigtness adjustment available separately for each profile. Sendo X is equipped with a graphics coprocessor called GraphiX - it works transparently by intercepting and processing all calls to graphic functions and thus letting the main ARM9 CPU keep its entire processing power for all other, non-graphic tasks.

Sendo X is a stereo phone - it not only generates high quality stereo sound via headset (2,5" stereo mini-jack connector) but it also features unique, dual loudspeaker design (speakers located on both sides of the casing). Similiarily to the graphics coprocessor, the SoniX system including a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) chip takes care of all audio related tasks.

The phone is equipped with USB port. USB cable comes bundled with the device and a docking station is available as an accessory. Unfortunately, the phone is not recognized as an USB storage device and it can only be accessed using PC Connect software but, on the other hand, the USB cable can be used for synchronisation and data exchange. Connectivity options also include Infrared and Bluetooth. Supported Bluetooth profiles are as follows: DUN-GW (Dial-Up Networking), Fax-GW, FT-Server (File Transfer), GAP (Generic Access Profile), HandsFree-AG, OPP-Client (Object Push), OPP-Server, GOEP (Generic Object Exchange), SDAP (Serice Discovery Profile), Serial-DevA, Serial-DevB (Serial Port), Logical Link Control (L2CAP).

Sendo X is a triband phone (EGSM 900 MHz / GSM 1800/1900 MHz). It supports GPRS (class 8, 4+1) and CSD data transmission.

The phone is equipped with 16 MB operating memory (RAM) with about 6 MB free for applications. Internal storage memory (64 MB) is divided into ROM (containing the OS and system applications) and user storage (about 32 MB) for 3rd party applications, user data and files. Sendo X features an SD/MMC memory card slot (hidden under the battery cover) allowing further expansion of the storage space.

The camera only supports VGA (640x480 pixels) resolution but it comes with several useful enhancements: besides the usual mirror for self-portraits you can also take advantage of a very smooth 4x digital zoom and a flash. As using real flash would severley affect battery life, the phone is equipped with a very, very bright white LED diode working like a torch and providing quite a good illumination in a couple of meters range. Another nice feature is red eye reduction with configurable number of pre-flashes.

Sendo X comes with a 1000 mAh Li-Ion battery providing up to 90-170 hours of standby and up to 4-7 hours of talk time. X is equipped with faxmodem that can be used via Infrared or Bluetooth with your laptop or PC.

New firmware releases can be downloaded from Sendo's web site and upgraded by users at home using the supplied USB cable.