Hugh Brogan kicks off today's presentation in London, after a hectic year of disputes with Microsoft, by launching the new Sendo X smartphone.

His initial briefing is a summary of the year. Growth, partners, numbers. Interesting number! - 800,000 phones sold in the last quarter, and expect to hit revenues of $200m for the calendar year.

"How did we do this?"

His first business priority is "operator focus" he says. Operator requirements of average revenue per user and customer retention come first, ahead of Sendo branding.

People did ask us "can't Nokia do what you're doing?" and of course, they can. "But in life, it's not what you do, but the way you do it; we can build quickly, and at low cost, but still in a customised manner."

That means cameras. Cameras are now becoming the "must have" item at mid-tier and above.

But there's a big future in mid-range GSM. That's because 3G isn't happening; there's a healthy business in GSM and EDGE because of the delay. Seeing BREW with 27% of the market for OS coming up with Symbian doing well and Microsoft with a foothold in the market.

Optimism for the market? Brogan is muted. "We've seen suggestions of big growth, but we are sceptical. What we do see is growth back to double-digit numbers."

So, if the momentum is here, what do we do? We're extending the range. We're adding increased java functions, and MMS expansions.

But we're also expanding geographically; America is taking off, and we're starting to look at business initiatives in Asia.

He shows a graph of growth: if the size of Sendo in the first half of 2001 was "one" then we're at "twelve" in the second half of 2003.

Next year: first quarter will be 20% smartphone - Sendo X and "other products in the smartphone range" and expect the year to see 4m -5m total unit sales.

Present range of products from entry phones (S300) through S 330 (multi-band versions) right up to M550 which has won awards (Industrie Forum design award) and is generating strong demand. That was "our first clamshell phone" and it was so popular that there will be more.

The stuff about the tech specs of the different phones is stuff you can find on his web site, so this report can ignore the details...

"A lot of people ask us how big the smartphone market is going to be."

Hugh Brogan thinks 30m global market for smart phones 2004. "We think 18 million units in Europe; we expect Nokia to take the lion's share of that, being the category leader. There are relatively few players. So 30m doesn't sound like a particularly big market, in cellular phones terms. But it's an attractive place to be, because it's the fastest growing segment

Symbian seems to be the market leader; our new phone is in that, and we think Symbian operating system will be the trend-setter.

Concluding, Brogan forecast that US revenues would jump by a factor of 2.5X next year, with manufacturing capacity reaching a million plus phones per quarter. And with that, he introduces Ron Schaeffer, product marketing boss.

But first, alas! - the blood image video. A woman with blue fingernails... a video camera... heavy, moody bass line. Louder and louder. the audience shifts, and your correspondent takes a quick nap...

Sendo, not Microsoft; Nokia, not Microsoft. And here's the phone!

Ron Schaeffer, product manager of Sendo, attempts to launch the Sendo X with a "low acronym count" presentation.

A little more background! Well, actually, a little less background; this story starts with the decision to license the Symbian operating system in November 2002. What about Microsoft? "Who?"

"Couldn't ask for a better partner. If we have a question, a Nokia engineer is on the plane next day to show us." Better than whom? not... Microsoft? No mention...

The point of Symbian and Nokia Series 60- it's an open standard. If we improve it, there's a framework under which we can license this back to nokia and symbian, and we're looking at this. And we're really taking advantage of the fact that we have source code access. All we can't do is break 3rd party compatibility - if you have a game, it has to run. Which makes sense!"

And with that, he finally introduces the phone. A picture of it. He holds it up! "You may have heard me say the same things about the Z100 a couple of years ago... the same things are true; it's a great phone, first. It's small and light."

Plus!
We have a co-processor for graphix, called GraphiX

-it does 2D graphics accelereation.
-it has a 30 frames per second viewfinder - no jump.jump.jump as you follow a subject
-it leaves the ARM9 processor free to run other tasks; it doesn't have to talk to the camera, write to the screen, but can run applications.

The screen is 176 by 220, 65K colour; "a bit bigger than the standard Series 60 dsplay; allows space for little indicators like battery power left."

This is one of the first phones with flash! - it has 16m colours in the camera. red-eye reduction.

"We have a video camcorder, too. it can use up to 90% of available memory."

See more! "We think if you can make someone look stupid in a picture, you're more likely to send it as an MMS. So theImage Editor is integrated into the Photo Album. You can add graphics, captions, crop the picture, and so on."

So much for the 'See more!' - what about 'hear more'?

The technology of SoniX (he doesn't call it that, sadly!) is the same as the Wave Radio speaker technlogy. The specially designed acoustic chamber gives high volume, without distortion. A high quality stereo headset is included as standard.

If you have a sonic format, then it's pretty much going to play on the phone. We play MP3, AMR, WAV, MIDI, SP-MIDI, XMF, Real and so on.

The voice Memo, the Voice MMS and the recordable ring tones are all stored in Real format.

'Connect more!' - Synchronisation:

Schaeffer talks about compatibility with your PC.

There's the option of a Nokia API; sendo X is compatible.

We ship with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF and Zip view capability. And with the CD rom that comes with the phone, there are 40 viewer types.

Voice dialling. You get your 1,000 outlook contacts loaded; you just press the dial button, and say "name dial John Smith" and it finds him.

"The same works for digit dialling. Call 0121 251 5000 and you get through to Sendo. And application activation works that way too.



The phone has up to six email accounts, there is IM - opreator optional versions of IM

There's PC synch for contacts, calendar, tasks, and email with either outlook or Notes.

There's the option of over-the-air e-mail synch.

Ron now demonstrates the memory card. He retrieves his 512 megabyte SD card for holding thousands of photographs. "The memory in the card and the 64 megabytes in the phone operate much the same way; you can store any kind of data in either place" - a dig at the Microsoft based package, which couldn't cope with that easily.

Finally, browsing.
Schaeffer shows a slide, which is supposed to be a 640x480 "small screen rendered" version of the Wall Street Journal web site. Then he shows how it will look on the Sendo X. I can't show the pic here; I'll get one for the main www.kewney.com site...

Custom look and feel.

The Now! screen is the replacement for the standard series 60 "idle" screen; it's the place you dial calls from. This replaces this first, with a 'multi-pane' screen. As you scroll left and right, the content of the screen changes. "There's no practical limit to the number of panes we can have. Each pane is built of an extensible plug-in architecture. So if I'm fond of music, my first pane can be places where I get MP3s, or I can have inbox items shown from my operator."

This is really aimed at network operator customisation.


We also allow you to have a good blend of what the operator wants you to see, and what you want to see - and hopefully, they are the same!

b>Accessories! </b>

This starts with the folding keyboard. It looks like any folding keyboard.

The stereo headset comes in the box. But there's the option of the bluetooth headset - clearly, the Plantronics design.

Finally, a round up of other features:

it's tri-band, GPRS,
120 MHz
and all the standard Series 60 "stuff"

Ron rushes anxiously to the deadline...

Edited by author 11-27-2003 06:42 AM
Questions?

Ron Schaeffer, product manager, rushes anxiously to the deadline...


The last screen is "the enhancements."
The list is long. USB connectivity is, oddly, one of them.

The "digital zoom" is a feature most people usually regard as nonsense. With the camcorder option, it isn't: you can, always, edit your photos frame by frame, but not your video.

First question: "What about Russia?"

Hugh Brogan, sans moustache and looking thinner... says he's done about $10m worth of business there.

Second question: "You're a generally conservative company; but operators are very wary about GSM/GPRS through to WiFi - so are you looking to build that into future phones?"

Brogan: 802.11? Certainly we're looking at it. There's lots of opinions from various sides. technically, we have a solution on how to do it! - the US seems to be the market that would be most relevant in right now. Bluetooth seems to be the wireless LAN solution preferred in europe right now.

We have the capability, we know how to do it; all we need is for a customer to ask us to do it, and then we can go forward.

Question: Murphy. "your original business plan was about the plastics; can you keep your business model if you move into feature phones?"

Brogan: "It's a question we've struggled with! The radio in here (the X) and here (the M550) is the same. The display is different. And the M550 is the same as the S300; we have a high degree of commonality."

Question: Operator orders; can you confirm?

Brogan: I can't confirm the size of the order from TIM (Italian operator) apart from admitting that it's not an enormous order! - but it's not significantly smaller than the orders they are placing with Nokia and others).

Question: This was quicker than the Z100. Is that because the operating system is better?

Brogan: Yes, a lot of stuff in this Symbian OS made things easier for us.

Question: Does it take SD or SDIO cards?

Schaeffer: It's SD; because there's no physical spec for SDIO larger than SD.

And now, we're off for a technical session, down stairs. I'll try to stay with you! - but this excellent Vodafone Mobile office card which is keeping me attached to the Internet may lose the signal in the centre of the atrium here at the Imagination Gallery.

The price? Ah yes; unsubsidised, TIM is asking E500, approximately in Italy.