Orange is set to launch a new smartphone in the UK. The brushed aluminium SPV C550 (108x48x19mm, 108g) is similar to the current SPV C500 handset, but offers more bells and whistles under the hood, plus a set of new controls on the front for multimedia playback and an improved display. Similar to its predecessor, the phone will be availble in either black or silver.

Powered by a 416MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor, the SPV C550 is a Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition smartphone with a 240x320-pixel display (QVGA) capable of displaying up to 65,000 colours. It also includes a 1.3-Megapixel digital camera (up from 640x480 pixels on the SPV C500), but there's still no built-in flash. There is, however, a 4x digital zoom.

The tri-band (900/1800/1900MHz) phone also comes with built-in Bluetooth, 64MB of internal memory (supports miniSD cards), infrared, and a speakerphone. The phone comes pre-loaded with Orange's own Music Player application, which links through to the network's 300,000-track music download store, part of its Orange World WAP portal. Multimedia niceties let you playback MP3, AAC, WAV and MPEG-4 files.

Talktime is quoted as up to 4-5 hours with a maximum of 6 days' standby time, which is very good. Bundled software includes Pocket Internet Explorer, Pocket Outlook (for e-mail) and Windows Media Player 10. Unfortunately, it looks like there are no versions of Word, Excel or PowerPoint included. Other features are pretty standard, including MMS, predictive text and Java.

BIOS, Jul 15, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Mobile phone