Beta news sites are reporting that last Thursday AT&T and Pantech showed off the Pantech C630 at a press event. The C630, which will be available on AT&Ts 3G network starting in December, reportedly runs Symbian OS. It has a candy-bar form factor, dual US 3G bands, 1.3 megapixel camera, a 176 x 220 screen, Bluetooth and a microSD card slot. The phone will be available at $50 on a service plan which would make it the cheapest Symbian phone available in the US.
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There are no S60-specific buttons, looks like usual feature phone...
This seems to be a Western equivalent to those MOAP phones in Japan, feature phones based on Symbian.
Strange that it doesn't use an existing Symbian platform, did they develop one of their own?
Is one of the chips inside this device. If you look on the FCC site for this device on page 5 (sorry, not allowed to post links).
There's a chip vendor marking on there I've not seen before in a Symbian phone.
Which either means this ain't a Symbian device OR it could be the start of a line of products...
This is something people don't talk about that much, the potential of OSes in non-smart phones. Symbian has been very widely used in Japan in non-smart devices, so presumably it has some value beyond running native applications?
Indeed. I was rather suprised when I saw this. I tried to get some confirmation, but no luck yet. Its possible this is a reporting mistake of course.
While it is theoertically perfectly possible it is still a bit suprising. Interesting spot unregistered. Guess we'll just have to wait and see. I did think twice about posting this, but in the end I did (and hopefully made clear its not 100% confirmed).
The Qualcomm chipset can be seen on some Korean devices nowadays. But I think it miss some chips to be a Symbian one. Maybe the AT&T representative were not talking about this one...
Yes that's a possibility (especially given the E71 and 6650 are going to be / are on AT&T). I have to admit I'd be surprised to see Symbian running on Qualcomm chips... Still trying to run down some more information on this. But at this moment I move this is to very speculative category pending more information. Please do comment or email me if you have any further info.
I have now received confirmation that the Pantech C630 is not a Symbian phone.
A good lesson for me in verifying from another source (and, in hindsight, some of the clues should have made this more obvious). Apologies once again. 😞
In the old days a Symbian S60 phone could be easily spotted by the keys but those days are long gone! My Samsung i8510 is the best Symbian phone I've EVER had but there are NO Symbian specific keys on it to give it away. Until you actually see one working you cannot tell what OS it has on it...