Orange UK Launches SPV C550 And SPV M500 Smart Phones

In a mobile world where the music download services for mobile phones will be the next big hit, considering Sony's partnership with Ericsson and the imminent Motorola and iTunes tie-up, it is quite normal that Orange has decided to establish its own model, with their own portal, Orange World, in order to try and keep customers. Moreover, the company has also launched the SPV C550 and SPV M500 smart phones, a week after the company posted details of the handsets on its website.

According to the Register, the C550 will be promoted under Orange's Great for Music label, which is no surprise, given the HTC-developed handset's focus on music playback, with separate Play/Pause and track-skip controls.

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. The songs are encoded in the iTunes-like but more efficient AAC Plus format, but the C550 can also play MP3 and WAV tracks, along with MPEG 4 video.

The mobile terminal also contains a 1.3 megapixel digicam with 4x digital zoom, which has become almost a standard feature in all modern mobile devices. Orange is bundling a 128MB MiniSD card for extra data storage - the phone contains 32MB of RAM. It also offers Bluetooth wireless connectivity, and is a tri-band (900/1800/1900) GSM/GPRS device.

The M500 uses the same camera, but ships with 64MB of RAM. In place of the C550's candybar phone form-factor, the M500 is styled like a compact PDA - it's HTC's 'Magician' device - with a 2.8in, 240 x 320, 64,000-colour display.

It too is a tri-band product, and incorporates Bluetooth. It runs Windows Mobile 2003 on a 416MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor.

The C550 goes on sale later this month, though Orange is already taking orders for the product. It's free of charge on a monthly subscription tariff, Orange said. The company did not announce pricing or availability for the M500, which remains listed as "coming soon" on the Orange website.