Glitz marches in step with Sendo's X launch

IF YOU COULD get past the she-wolves guarding the lifts to the actual Press conference in the Imagination gallery, Wednesday's official launch of the X smartphone from Sendo was truly glitzy.

The only real eye-opener came when CEO, Hugh Brogan, refused to deny the firm was contemplating any further litigation (besides still suing Microsoft.)

The possibilities could well include a lawsuit against Taiwan's HTC over design elements that eventually ended up in HTC's Canary (the Orange SPV).

Most of the details concerning the actual specs of X - Sendo's first Series 60 Symbian smartphone - had already leaked or been announced. What differentiates the X from other Symbian phones sadly falls into the trivial, although Sendo's Ron Schaeffer did his best to make it all sound exciting.

The proof will be in the pudding - just how easy will it be for operators to splash their brand all across the X?

That's something that just won't happen with a Nokia produced Series 60 handset, by contrast. We got a glimpse of how much the X costs without subsidies when Sendo announced a big contract with Italy's WIND where the handset will sell for around 500 Euros.

A full and comprehensive specs list has been released by the company with the Opera supplied browser showing how Sendo is prepared to work with third parties.

There also appears to be an inherent problem with the Symbian OS recognising a memory card above 128 Mb although Sendo said if 2 Gb SD cards eventually shipped, they'll try hard to support them.

The only other real area to watch is how easy Sendo makes it to upgrade the X's operating software - part of which can already be changed by OTA (Over The air Activation) techniques.

The press conference also threw fuel over a problem with British versions of the Outlook whereby telephone numbers imported from a handset into the Outlook addressbook add an additional '0' after the county code. That means they then can't be dialled from the PC without editing.