The first thing that strikes you about the Sendo X is it conservative design, no avant-garde keypad or curvy bodywork, just a clean, simple rectangular box. But while the design is conservative it is not short of a visual trick or two. The initial reaction of most is that the Sendo X is a small phone, an impression created by the combination of a dark casing and silver keypad, with rather dainty keys. However the Sendo X is really not much smaller than a Nokia 6600 as you can see below.

The keyboard layout will be largely familiar to a Series 60 user, except for the fact that the edit key is on a small silver button on the left hand side of the phone. An identical button on the right provides access to the voice control (of which more later). Left handed users get the option to swap the keys over to make the edit key more easily accessible.

The keyboard, due to the spacing between the small keys is easy to use. The jogpad consists of a central raised select button with the direction selectors on the outer disk. Initially we found the jogpad a little disconcerting as the raised select felt as though it should behave like a joystick, but it was easy enough to adapt to and soon felt quite natural.

The screen is crisp and clear, offering five levels of brightness, and although not quite up to the standard of the current Nokia offerings, it is very readable in a range of conditions. A nice feature is the inclusion of the screen brightness as a profile item (along with separate brightness control for video) which makes adjusting the brightness to an environment a lot easier – although the potential convenience is slightly hampered by the Series 60 limitation of only allowing six profiles.

The Sendo X also has an additional permanent status area above the standard Series 60 screen showing information such as battery strength, signal strength, GPRS connection, unread mail, PC connection and alike.

The other physical feature worth mentioning is that the MMC card can be swapped without turning the phone off, by sliding back the battery cover as shown below.

The Now! Screen

On activating the Sendo X you are immediately immersed in what is perhaps the key differentiator for the Sendo X, the Now! screen.

The Now! screen provides fully customizable environment capable of showing summary information on calendar events, active tasks, messages and calls, an application use history (all using Sendo plug-ins) and shortcuts to both applications and content.

In our review phone four panes were provided, My Pane, Favourites, History and Sendo. These are likely to be different from the panes on retail phones as the Now! Screen offers operators the ability to add and maintain, over the air, access links to products and services. However as we were not running the phone on a supported network we were unable to see this functionality at work.

The Now! screen also gives the user control over the content. Customization options include adding new panes, adding plug-ins or application shortcuts, controlling the pane order and presentation, including backgrounds on each pane and the right hand softkey short cut.

The standard Favourites screen can include links to content from various applications including images, video and RealOne player content, amongst others. One small drawback is that the shortcuts are added as “Photos” or “Notes” so it is not possible to see which “favourite” the item actually is.

Sendo plug-ins can also be added to the favourites pane, but not application links, because this pane is the main one designed to allow operators to create content links. But as you can create your own panes for application shortcuts, this is hardly a limitation.

And we almost forgot, you can also dial the phone from the Now! screen!

Applications

Being a Series 60 phone the Sendo X delivers a full set of PIM and smart applications including Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Messaging, WAP browser and all the other standard applications which will be familiar to a Series 60 user. But Sendo has also provided a range of other application that help, in addition to the Now! screen, differentiate the Sendo X from other Series 60 phones.

Fun Extras

Sendo have also put a lot of effort into ensuring the Sendo X is an attractive user package but adding “little” extras in several areas. For example the range of built in ring tones is quite dazzling, it takes about 20 minutes simply to review all the sounds which range from the Chickens clucking and dogs barking all the way musical ring tones relefecting tastes as diverse as Latin and Techno, our personal favortite is the very traditional phone ring ting tone. The other area that has a wealth of additional content is MMS where some 60 odd expressive cartoon images are provided to help say everything from “I Love You” to “I’ve gone shopping”.

Web Browsing

Although the Sendo X includes the standard Series 60 WAP browser Sendo has had the foresight to also include the Opera Browser. The Opera Browser deserves a review of its own as it is an impressive piece of technology which makes viewing the World Wide Web on a small screen practical. Also should you find the costs of network traffic an issue the Sendo X’s Opera browser is compatible with Opera’s Mobile Accelerator a service which allows you to reign in your the GPRS bill – you can try it free for 14 days simply by accessing www.opera.com/proxy from the Sendo X’s browser.

Imaging

The Sendo X offers both still and video image capture.

The still camera, which can be activated by a long press on the three key when in the Now! screen, offers three picture sizes, 640x480, 160x120 and 80x96 pixels in High, Normal or Basic quality

The image quality is good for a 640x480 cameraphone and in our test shots appears to outperform the camera on a Nokia 6600, as hopefully can be seen below.

Sendo X	Nokia 6600

In addition to the standard shots the camera can capture zoomed images in the three formats, although, as they are simply cropped from the 640x480 images, they do not offer any additional image quality.

The Camera also comes equipped with a flash, well flash is perhaps slightly overstating the capability, which is provided by an LED mounted next to the camera lens, as unlike a conventional flash it illuminates for a noticeable period of time. As a result the flash does not stop low light pictures from blurring if the subject is moving. But it is a handy addition for capturing nocturnal antics. The camera application also provides a red eye feature with optional pre-flash, although given the length of time the flash illuminates it is not really needed.

The imaging capability is not limited to simply taking snaps. The Sendo X includes Digia’s Image Editor which offer features to add text, icons and frames to an image even combine two or more images. It also offers blur or distort features thus providing a range of creative possibilities for altering existing pictures or simply creating new images from scratch. It is perhaps however disappointing that ImageEdit can not be accessed directly from the photo album.

The Sendo’s camcorder offers 176x144 and 128x96 resolutions with high, medium and low quality and a high or low frame rate. The video captured can be limited by files size, duration, percentage of available memory or for use in MMS, and video can be recorded with or without sound. These options allow the creation of virtually any length video. Results are good given the limitations of the format.

Video is replayed using the RealOne Player, which also provides the capability to view streamed video content.

Audio

The Sendo X includes a built-in MP3 player. Tracks can be organized into playlists and the tracks played sequentially or at random with track and playlist repeats. Playlists can only be edited once they have been opened which automatically starts playing the first track.

The sound quality on the Sendo X is impressive. The speaker system a SoniX dual port acoustic speaker to be precise, provides a good quality sound – given the obvious size limitations – and the headphone the quality is outstanding. At first we thought the volume was disappointing until we discovered the additional volume control built into the headset which works independently of the volume set in the profiles.

Documents

Several earlier Series 60 phones, which have been directly marketed to a professional user, were criticized for the lack of document viewer. There are no such issues with the Sendo X which comes with an impressive document viewer. The basic installation includes support for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files along with PDF and ZIP files. An additional install file, on the companion CD, offers a further range of document types including Visio, Lotus and WordPerfect.

The viewer provides several views and a zoom feature. It works very well with word processor files where draft mode provides a wrapped text view which makes reading documents easy on the small screen. Other document formats are rendered well but the usability is somewhat limited because of the small screen.

Voice Activation

If it comes to picking the most impressive feature of the Sendo X there are several to choose from but the voice control would be a pretty good contender. Based on Voice Signal technology (see our earlier feature here) VSuite is a speaker independent system, which requires no training, capable of both voice dialing and voice control to launch applications.

Launched from the right hand silver button we mentioned earlier the Name Dialing feature is initiated by the spoken tag "Name Dial" followed by the first and last names of the contact being called. After it has identified potential matches VSuite list them and then reads down each one until you tell it “Yes” that is the person you want to call. Once the contact is selected a list of available numbers are presented, but oddly these options are not read out, rather it relies on you simply stating the one you want. Then it dials.

From the 630 contacts in our review phone’s contact list VSuite rarely offered more than three possible matches and invariably the correct on was first on the list.

The Contacts application has its own simple tag, "contacts", followed by the name of the contact to open. All other application are opened by the tag "Open" followed by the application name. By default the Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Contacts, Messaging, Notes, Settings, Tasks and WAP (but not Opera) applications are activated for voice command, however any installed application can be added to the list.

You can also controls aspects of the recognition including the sensitivity, speed and accuracy. Obviously the faster the recognition the less accurate the command or name match becomes.

While VSuite is a great application and makes voice command and control a practical reality on the Sendo X it has one annoying feature, if no correct matches were found it simply closes, so you have to start all over again. While the accuracy was generally good – even in quite noisy environments – on the rare occasions we had to restart voice control repeat the process was an annoyance given that a simple “would you like to try again” loop would seem such a simple addition.

Games

These days no mobile phone is complete without a built in selection of games and the Sendo X is no exception, coming with Sendo Pinball and Funny Farmer.

Sendo Pinball, which only provides sound when a profiles with the ring volume set on maximum is ion use, provides a challenging and realistic feeling pinball table.

By contrast Funny Farmer is a strategy game where you use your skill to husband a farm growing crops and raising livestock. It is certainly an engaging theme although we never quite found time to really get to grips with the nuances of the game. We suspect Funny Farmer is the more durable of the two games and it should provide hours of amusement for those long commutes home.

Connectivity and Synchronization

The Sendo X includes Infrared, Bluetooth and USB connectivity options and is supplied with the Sendo PC Connect. PC Connect is very similar to other Series 60 connect offerings, providing features for synchronization of calendar items, contacts, tasks and emails to and from Microsoft Exchange and Schedule+ or Lotus Notes and Organizer, a software installer, back-up and recovery routines and a file browser.

Accessories

Optional accessories for the Sendo X include the obligatory Bluetooth headset and Bluetooth car kit. In addition a keyboard and desktop cradle are also available

The keyboard look very interesting however one was not supplied one for review. Functionality includes the ability to set application shortcuts for the function keys and the ergonomics look quite workable. With the standard applications its use would be largely limited to messaging, however the Sendo X makes a good platform for Mobility Electronics iGo QuickOffice software, which we were able to load and run quite happily. Such a combination would make a perfect lightweight office.

Third Party Software

We tried a range of third party software on the Sendo X and generally all the applications designed for Series 60 loaded and ran successfully.

Miscellaneous

One other feature for the Sendo X worth mentioning is that is support do it yourself firmware updates over the Internet. How effective this is we did not have the opportunity to discover as no update is yet available.

Performance

In everyday use the performance of the Sendo X is very good. Powered by a 120 MHz ARM processor with a graphic coprocessor it is on paper the fasted of the Series 60 phone we had available for comparison. It also has the largest internal memory at 32Mb. This was really noticeable when as found we could run several heavy applications such as Opera and QuickOffice along with a host of built in applications simultaneously.

The everyday use of the phone and the hardware specification led us to expect a good result from the FutureMark SPMark04 benchtest, and that is what we got. We ran a series of benchmarks against the Nokia 6600 and obtained the results presented below.

What did surprise us was that the 3D graphic performance was not better than the Nokia phone given that Sendo have been touting the graphic coprocessor capabilities of the Sendo , although we have as yet been unable to confirm whether the Nokia 6600 has a graphics coprocessor.

Conclusion

Overall the Sendo X is a great phone, it extends the Series 60 paradigm well and although it is based on the first edition of Series 60 lacks nothing for that. There are many little extras which show an attention to detail, such as the ability to swap the edit and voice recognition buttons for left handed users and additional content such as ring tones and MMS cartoons. If it has any drawback it is that it does not clearly targeted at either the consumer or professional markets. Features like the MP3 player, image editor and video are clearly consumer features while the document viewer and add-on keyboard are obviously designed more for the professional market. For a smaller phone company, like Sendo, there are clearly disadvantages in too clearly focusing a device like the Sendo X to one particular market as it could reduce the phones reach, however doing so could mean the Sendo X fails to capture the imagination of either audience. However given Sendo’s track record of creating devices which fulfill an operators specific marketing needs the Sendo X will almost certainly be something of a chameleon, an enterprise phone for one operator, a consumer device for another and it is certainly well designed to achieve that and provide satisfaction to consumers in both segments.