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3GSM Congress 2006. Sharp

Outside its native market Sharp is known only for products that are created only for Vodafone network, this means 1-2 phones per year. The attempt to conquer international market starting from Russia turned out being a huge failure. The company was unable to form a product line-up, the prices were too high. At 3GSM Congress Sharp demonstrated Sharp GX29, which does not have any major differences from previous solutions from this company. It has QVGA display resolution, 1.9” screen. Built-in camera is only VGA, that’s weird, but most likely this model will be positioned as a slim solution. Once again this phone was designed for Vodafone.

The 550SH is built on the same platform, but it is related to 3G networks, 1.3mpx camera in the back and another camera in the front for video calls, the screen’s resolution remains the same.

There was another model called GX17 with VGA-camera and screen’s resolution was only 128x160 pixels, this is Sharp’s cheapest phone.

Sharp GX17

The SH902i is very interesting, it’s manufactured for NT DoCoMo and is available only in Japan. This is one of the first phones that have 2.4” display, made by Veil-View Mobile Advanced Super-V LCD technology. The screen is truly amazing. The Veil View technology is very interesting, it allows polarizing light in order the picture on the display to be seen only from one angle. Once you disable the polarization, you will see the picture from all angles. This might be useful when you are in a crowdy place and you don’t want everyone to know what you’re doing with your phone. Privacy protection at its best.

The phone also has 3.2mpx camera with CCD-matrix. The camera has 5 glass lenses, 2x optical zoom. One of those pleasant surprises is anti-shock feature for video recording, face recognition feature for frontal camera, this will allow implementing new security features for applications. And presence of built-in office file viewer also seems rather unexpected. These models will not be released in the near future by any manufacturer, it will take at least a year before similar products will appear.

The next model for Vodafone was shown in black box, it was not officially announced, all bottom part was covered, you could see only the screen. The display is almost unique, its one of the first with VGA resolution, 480x640 pixels. The screen’s technology is called Mobile Advanced Super-V LCD, it’s not only bright and sharp, but it also has wide viewable angles. Look how much information you can place with the help of such resolution, even though the physical size is not so big, only 2.4”.

Overall madness about mobile TV affected Sharp too, the company showed phone’s prototype with support of T-DTV, the specifications are kind of last year, reminds us the well-known GX25.

The company also demonstrated A-GPS applications, one of the advantages of which was the quality of company’s displays, which are one of that best on the market.

The last model is W-Zero3, this is communicator based on Windows Mobile 5 to be released for Japanese market, we’ll tell you more about it in other article.