Sharp GX40 Spotted

Announcement expected soon
20th October 2005
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For more up-to-date information, please see this article.

The Sharp GX40 has been rumoured ever since the GX30 came out, and we speculated about it almost exactly a year ago.

The good news is that Sharp have filed some details with the FCC about the new handset. The bad news is that it doesn't appear to be much of an improvement over the GX30i.

As with the GX30, the GX40 is a Vodafone exclusive (branded "Vodafone by Sharp"). It's a tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900) device with Bluetooth, so no 3G or quad-band here.

Physically, the GX40 measures 93x46x23mm which is larger than the GX30 but not quite as big as the Sharp 703. It's a bigger handset primarily because it now has an internal antenna.

The camera is a 1.3 megapixel unit (up from 1.0 megapixels), so Sharp have missed out on fitting it with a 902-style 2 megapixel camera. The internal display is a 2 inch 240x320 pixel panel in 262,000 colours which is pretty usual for a Sharp handset, with an external monochrome panel of 72x48 pixels which is not as good as the 64x96 pixel 65,000 colours unit on the GX30, but larger than the Sharp 902's 72x12 pixel screen.

Memory expansion is through miniSD cards, and there's an optional stereo headset available too. At an estimated 90 grams in weight, the GX40 is 20 grams lighter than the GX30 was.

One key thing.. we don't know what the GX40 looks like, although from the FCC shot of the rear of the phone we can see that it's more curved than the 703, 902 and 903 phones. If you can picture a stretched, antenna-less GX30 then might be just about the right concept.

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