Will’s Blog

According to an article in Reuters, the mobile phone (or rather the Orange SPV C500 SmartPhone as referred to in the article) could be the next iPOD killer.

The Orange SPV C500 has many names, depending on which part of the world you’re in. Locally in Australia, it’ll be referred to as the i-mate SP3. Elsewhere it is known as the Audiovox SMT 5600, and referred to by the manufacturer as the HTC Typhoon. (HTC is the hardware manufacturer).

I have blogged about the device launch previously, and according to the CarrierDevices Press Release that I read last month, it is set to be released locally this month. Still no sign of it as of yet though.

I know I stated previously the release date was October 4th, but I, and the source that I got the date from was wrong. Hopefully they stay true to their word though, October is a good month. Releasing it now, means the price will mature prior to Christmas.

One interesting note is that the i-mate SP3 actually uses the mini-SD card, so if you’ve got an SD card around, you’ll need to buy a new one. You can’t just use the normal one with this device.

I don’t understand why they went for this smaller card. My brother has the Nokia 6230, and that uses a normal sized MMC card. Though. the card does fit under the battery, as opposed to the SP3 (and SP3i) which allows you to slot the card into the bottom of the device.

KC Lemson has a word of caution on buying a Mini-SD card online.

Right now, the largest capacity for the Mini-SD that i’ve seen around is 512MB. Now think, would 512MB give you enough storage to be enough to store all of your music that you would perhaps listen to?

Quite possibly, but then you have to remember that this is a SmartPhone, which means you’re probably likely to be storing other files and so on, on the mini-SD card.

If we are talking about MP3 files, let’s try to fit as many 4mb (so, roughly 4minute songs) songs as we can into 512mb. So we can fit in 128 songs, which is just over 2 hours. (I’m sure you could always just downsample the songs so you can easily fit more on there!)

Well, 2 hours is long enough for your average city commute right? Perhaps 1 hour (max) each trip. You can also take photos with the SP3, which is handy for the situations where you see something slightly interesting. (That’s if you have any space left after all those music files )

This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2004 at 04:43 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.