Sendo P600

Discontinued
27th August 2004

Sendo have in interesting reputation amongst followers of the mobile phone industry - on one hand, they're responsible for attractive and desirable devices like the Sendo X Smartphone, and on the other they churn out cheap-and-cheerful handsets aimed primarily at the pay-as-you-go market.

The Sendo P600 seems to fit into the "cheap and cheerful" category, although Sendo have done a lot of work in the looks department - Sendo had a reputation with producing some pug ugly handsets like the Sendo S300. We guess that the "P" stands for "Professional", and certainly the Sendo P600 seems to be roughly comparable to a run-of-the-mill handset such as the Nokia 6610i, but just a little bit more interesting to look at.

Sendo haven't said much about the P600, but we believe that the P600 is a derivative of the Sendo S600 which is a decent enough low cost consumer handset, but one yet to be released. (In fact another one of Sendo's reputations is that products tend to be very late).

What we do know for certain about the Sendo P600 is that it has a digital camera with 5X digital zoom, 128x128 pixel display and measures approximately 105x45x22mm. We're pretty certain that the phone weighs around 85 grams, has a 65,000 colour display, the camera resolution is 640x480 pixels, comes with GPRS and a WAP 2.0 browser, comes with an image editor and Sendo's Xsend enhanced messaging system, Java, video recording capabilities, polyphonic ringtones and at least 4Mb of internal memory. We don't know at present if the Sendo P600 is a tri- or dual-band phone.

In purely technical terms, the Sendo P600 is fairly dull. Almost every phone on the market today has a better feature set than the Sendo P600. Except for one - and that's Nokia, the market leader. And you can be reasonably assured that the Sendo P600 is much, much cheaper than the equivalent Nokia 6610i.  Indeed there's more that just a touch of the Nokia 6610i in the Sendo P600. In terms of size and specifications, it's very similar indeed, and the multiway navigation keys on them are distinctive and nearly identical (see right).

We wrote a little about Sendo's reputation (clever, inexpensive, late) but this is an outfit that punches hard for a small company. Ignoring the fact that they are currently in a David versus Goliath battle with Microsoft (and with a good chance of winning), Sendo are becoming known for their enormous flexibility, especially where networks are concerned. They will happily change specifications to suit networks - sometimes major ones, and are unfussed about their brandname (which in any case is carried on the flagship Sendo X). And in terms of the marketplace, the Sendo X smartphone is impressing power users, while the competent and good value M570 and S600 compete well for entry-level customers. Perhaps the P600 marks Sendo's entry into the mid-range, which could be an interesting fight.

We're hoping for more details on the Sendo P600 soon. Subscribe to our newsletter for more updates.