Siemens SP65

Cancelled
2nd April 2005

The Siemens SP65 is simply a Siemens S65 handset with the camera removed. As far as we can tell there's no other difference between the SP65 and S65 handsets, they even share identical casing and colour schemes. It's notable that this is a "65" series handset rather than a later "70" or "75" series handset, so basically there are no surprises here.

When the original S65 was announced a year ago, it was a pretty good phone. In specification terms, the new Siemens SP65 still looks quite respectable, with a 132x176 pixel display in 65,000 colours, Bluetooth, expandable memory on RSMMC cards, email client, WAP 2.0 browser and inbuilt handsfree.

The SP65 is clearly pitched at those businesses who don't want digital cameras proliferating all over the place - so really the SP65 is another "Nokia 6310i Successor" class phone, with the key elements of being camera free with Bluetooth, and as such it competes against the Nokia 6021 and Motorola C390 but the Siemens handset has a much better specification.

It's a tri-band 900/1800/1900 GSM phone with GPRS, but no EDGE or HSCSD data support. Talktime is a decent 5 hours maximum, with up to 10 days standby time. The SP65 can be connected to a PC via Bluetooth, infra-red, USB or serial cable and synchronised using SyncML - making the SP65 very flexible in this respect. Physically, the SP65 measures 109x48x18mm and weighs only 90 grams - there's no camera on the back, just an antenna interface.

So, we think this is a decent enough replacement for something like the 6310i, but the problem with the SP65 is that it is so obviously a cut down S65 handset, shorn of the 1.3 megapixel camera. Bearing this in mind, the inclusion of RSMMC memory seems pointless as the SP65 really has no way to use it, lacking an MP3 player and being pretty limited in other media playback. Internal memory is 11Mb, which is frankly enough. The 132x176 pixel screen is larger than its Nokia or Motorola rivals, but still hardly the sort of thing you want to use to read email messages on - 176x220 pixels would be better.

Perhaps a camera-less version of the Siemens CX75 would be a better bet, and there's no reason why Siemens can't come up with that later this year. As it is, the SP65 is really a bit of a stop-gap model fighting it out for this particular niche, where it stands up rather well to its competition.

 Subscribe to our newsletter for more news on upcoming releases