Orange SPV C550

Discontinued
12th July 2005

The Orange SPV C550 (pictured right) is a version of the HTC Amadeus handset and it is functionally very similar to the T-Mobile SDA Music. In simple terms, this is the older C500 handset with some more bells and whistles under the hood, plus a set of new controls on the front for multimedia playback and an improved display.

First spotted way back in February 2005 by CoolSmartPhone the original snapshots were of a black C550, similar to the C500 in colour. However, the production unit appears to be silver which looks rather better.

This is a Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition smartphone with a 240x320 pixel display (QVGA) in 65,000 colours. On the rear of the SPV C550 is a 1.3 megapixel camera (with no flash, the blob next to the camera lens in a self portrait mirror), Bluetooth, 64Mb of internal memory, expandable memory on miniSD cards (128Mb card included, 512Mb reported maximum) and tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900), GPRS (but no EDGE or 3G) and a modest 108 grams in weight which makes it reasonably light for a smartphone. Talktime is quoted as up to 4-5 hours with a maximum of 6 days standby time.

The C550's software bundle includes Pocket Internet Explorer, Pocket Outlook (for email) and Windows Media Player 10 - but no versions of Word, Excel or PowerPoint are included. Other features are pretty standard, including infra-red, speakerphone functions, MMS, predictive text and Java.

None of the details we have seen for the SPV C550 indicate that it has any kind of stereo playback, but the handset the C550 is based on (the HTC Amadeus) does come with a wired stereo headset. If stereo playback is important to you, then check before ordering.

When this handset was first rumoured, back in February 2005 it looked pretty good, but since then we've had some exceptionally impressive music handsets such as the Sony Ericsson W800i, Nokia N91 and Samsung SGH-I300 which tend to offer more interesting features. Still, if you're in the market for a Windows smartphone, but want a more traditional handset than a PDA-style device, then the Orange SPV C550 looks promising.

The SPV C550 is already available in some Orange territories in Europe.

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