Siemens
SX1

Announced in February 2003 at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, the Siemens SX1 sent shockwaves through the industry as it was the first non-Nokia phone to run the Symbian operating system combined with Nokia’s Series 60 platform. It's compact and attractive design came as a surprise to Nokia’s engineers who had announced the bulky and rather ugly Nokia 3650 at the same event. It also had a higher quality 65k resolution display compared to the 4K display on the rival Nokia device. Unfortunately Siemens was unable to capitalise on it's competitive advantage over Nokia as the SX1 did not start shipping until December 2003, by which time the Nokia 6600 had been announced – a device with similar styling but a traditional keyboard and better performance. The SX1 featured a quirky keyboard design with strips of keys down each side of the screen. This made it difficult to use for consumers used to a standard keypad layout. To help overcome this, Siemens included a game called Typegun to help familiarise users with the keyboard layout. The SX1 was also notable for having one of the first augmented reality games, Mozzies. This was a first-person shooter game where the user saw mosquitos overlaid on the video feed from the camera viewfinder and had to “shoot” the mosquitos to gain points. A number of exclusive variants of the Siemens SX1 were created including the Siemens SX1 McLaren Edition which is also part of the Mobile Phone Museum collection.