Sharp GX33

Available now
23rd August 2007

We haven't seen a handset from Sharp in a little while, but the Sharp GX33 is the latest handset to hit Europe from this Japanese giant. Looking a little like last year's GX40, the GX33 is a fairly compact clamshell phone. This particular handset is aimed at the value end of the market.

And here is the problem - although we anticipate that the Sharp GX33 will offer very good value for money, it's rather too basic to be that exciting. The GX33 has a 1.9" 176x220 pixel display, VGA resolution digital camera, Bluetooth, a web browser and email client and really not much else. There's no expandable memory, and the GX33 also doesn't have a multimedia player. At 87 grams, the GX33 is quite light and it comes it quite a pleasing design overall. In our experience, Sharp mobile phones are always well built and easy to use, so it looks like an appealing choice if you don't want to spend too much.

Sharp can certainly manage something more exciting than this. Remember, this is the company that gave us the first European megapixel phone, the GX30, in 2004. Later that year, Sharp announced the groundbreaking 902, easily the most sophisticated 3G phone on the market at the time. They then improved on this in 2005 with the Sharp 903, which is still available in several markets. When the 902 and 903 were launched, they were way ahead of the competition in terms of features. And although Sharp has continued to innovate in their home market of Japan, the European market has been stuck with some rather lacklustre devices such as this.

The Sharp GX33 is exclusive to Vodafone, and is due to be in stores in the very near future.