0Sendo
S330
Announced
2003
Weight
81 grams
Features
The S330 was a derivative of the S300 aimed at the teenage market as Sendo’s first colour mobile phone. At launch, it was the lowest-cost colour mobile phone on the market and it was sold to network operators around the world. It was offered in two variants, a dual-band 900/1800 MHz version for European markets and an 850/1900 MHz version for the Americas. The phone was very small and light at 79 cc’s and 81 grams. It had a 4096 colour TFT display, with the ability to download games, ringtones and wallpapers over GPRS, polyphonic ringtones, easy messaging and a range of graphic SMS combat games that could be played point-to-point between other Sendo devices where each user pre-programmed a series of moves in a battle that then played out on the user's screen once the text was sent. The device was very popular becoming the number one best-selling phone on the Vodafone network in the UK in the fourth quarter of 2003.
The S330 was based both mechanically and also on the core electronics of the S300 which was a monochromatic displayed phone designed to be a user's first mobile phone. It sold well in both developed markets and also in emerging markets. Both phones used a very advanced radio architecture (at the time) based upon Silicon Labs Nearly Zero IF pure CMOS radio (NERO) which dramatically reduced the component count of the radio (by approximately 100 components) and improved battery performance. This was the first implementation of such a radio technology in a mobile phone and was a co-development project between Silicon Labs and Sendo. The phone was very memory efficient and the entire phone only used a 32 Mbit NAND flash to store the entire protocol stack used to connect and operate the phone on the network, all messaging and all the colour graphics and user-configurable downloads and ran on an 8-bit microprocessor.
The S330 was offered as a co-branded device (adding the network operator brand to the housing in conjunction with Sendo branding) and was also sold under the sole Sendo brand.
The S330 was also mechanically configurable meaning that the front cover could be changed to allow for different front facia designs and keyboard styles of which there were many. This allowed Sendo to manufacture the core phones in large quantities and then configure/customise them for different customer requests very quickly allowing large customised orders to be fulfilled in under 48 hours from order placement.