It was fiddly to use, had a terrible
screen and poor build quality - but the Siemens SL55
is certainly one of the cutest phones ever made.
Launched in 2003, the SL55 was probably the tiniest phone on the market, measuring just 82 x 45 x 22 mm and weighing 79 grams. But it wasn't just the small size of the SL55 that turned heads - the elegant combination of curves and styling details meant that this phone has a huge amount of "wow factor".. and the SL55 was making inroads into this marketplace a full year before Motorola's RAZR.
Launched in 2003, the SL55 was probably the tiniest phone on the market, measuring just 82 x 45 x 22 mm and weighing 79 grams. But it wasn't just the small size of the SL55 that turned heads - the elegant combination of curves and styling details meant that this phone has a huge amount of "wow factor".. and the SL55 was making inroads into this marketplace a full year before Motorola's RAZR.
The 101 x 80 pixel 4096 colour CSTN
display was a bit basic even in 2003. The SL55 had GPRS,
a WAP browser, polyphonic ringtones, but it didn't have
Bluetooth or a camera.. and certainly nothing fancy
like an MP3 player. Of course, it could make phone calls
and send text messages too, and really that's all the
SL55 was designed to be.. a compact, attractive phone
for people who really just need basic functionality.
The SL55 was quite a successful phone,
but Siemens could never really come up with a suitable
successor. The SL65
and SL75
were better specified but lacked the charm of the original
SL55, and eventually the whole Siemens Mobile business
folded.
For a time, Siemens showed great promise
with a number of highly innovative designs, but they
never could reliably sort out their quality control
issues. Ultimately the SL55 stands as a reminder of
what might have been, and it still calls out for a modern
remake.
Siemens
SL55 at a glanceSource:
GSMArena
|
|
Available:
|
2003 |
Network:
|
GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 |
Data:
|
GPRS |
Screen:
|
101 x 80 pixels, 4096 colours |
Camera:
|
No |
Size: | Compact
slider 82 x 45 x 22mm / 79 grams |
Bluetooth: | No |
Memory card: | No |
Infra-red: | No |
Polyphonic: | Yes |
Java: | Yes |
GPS: | No |
Battery life: | 5 hours talk / 9 days standby |
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