Click to View

As the name implies, the candy-bar format Sendo X2 Music Phone, introduced at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France this week, is aimed squarely at folks who like to listen to digital music on the go.

With that in mind, the company asserts the phone delivers exceptional audio performance (for a mobile handset) through an integrated speaker or a bundled stereo headset as a result of its custom-designed SoniX sound system.

Digital music formats supported include MP3, of course, plus the higher-quality and memory efficient AAC and AAC+ formats adopted by the mobile industry as standards.

The X2 offers copy protection to music sellers and content owners through support for Open Mobile Alliance's digital rights management (DRM) standard. Audio can be transferred from PC to handset via Bluetooth or USB.

Sendo product management director Ron Schaeffer asserts the X2 "is the first phone that makes playing music truly as simple as making a call. Just switch the phone on and press Play. There’s no wading through menus or searching to find your songs. The exclusive Sendo Now! Screen with its built-in Music Player and clear control keys literally put your music at your fingertips.”

The GSM/GPRS X2, which is built on Nokia’s Series 60 interface, is the smallest (5.2 cubic inches/85 cubic centimeters and 0.7 inches/18 millimeters thick) and lightest (3.4 ounces/95 grams) Symbian handset yet announced. It has a 2.2-inch 176 x 208 pixel resolution display that supports 65,536 colors.

There is also 32MB of RAM, a 1.3 megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom and camcorder, and a miniSD card slot which can now support up to 1 GB of extra storage thanks to San Disk's announcement today that it doubled the maximum capacity of the format from 512 MB.

That's a good amount of memory for your average user without a huge digital audio collection, but far from what would be necessary to compete effectively against hard drive based MP3 music players like the iPOD.

To Sendo, the X2 is the mobile phone industry's answer to the huge growth of MP3 players like Apple’s iPOD series.

Schaeffer said, “Phones haven’t really been credible alternatives to dedicated digital audio players until now. The Sendo X2 changes all that. It’s got the music format support that both consumers and operators want, memory that’s expandable to over 1GB and rich, high quality sound.”

The company plans to ship the X2 in Europe sometime this summer for an as-of-yet undisclosed price. It is not known when or if the handset will be made available in the United States or other regions.