Sendo

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~ the last words ~

The phone counter in Ankara in 2004 was Nokia, and behind that more Nokia, with a Motorola or a Siemens somewhere at the edge of the shelf. Sendo sold the way a lot of European handset makers sold, through the operator rather than the shop window, and the operators carrying it were not the ones I was buying from. The name reached me years later attached to a court case instead of to a phone.

Sendo was founded in Birmingham in 1998 by Hugh Brogan, who filled it with engineers out of Philips and Motorola. The plan was unglamorous and reasonable. Build cheap handsets quickly for carriers who needed something to put in the box, and stay small enough to turn a design around before the market moved. At its largest the company had about three hundred people, and in 2004 it shipped five million devices.

In February 2001 Microsoft paid twelve million dollars for roughly a tenth of Sendo and took a seat on the board. The deal was that Sendo would build the first phone running the operating system then codenamed Stinger, which the world would meet as Windows Powered Smartphone 2002. That handset was the Sendo Z100, due in shops in November 2002. It was canceled weeks before launch.

Sendo's account is that the software never arrived in a condition it could ship, and that while it waited, its own hardware work went to HTC in Taiwan. HTC built the Orange SPV, which is the phone the Z100 was supposed to be. Sendo cut the partnership in November 2002 and sued in a Texas court the month after. Microsoft countersued in February 2003 for breach of contract, arguing that Sendo was the party that had walked away.

~ the record ~

~ the settlement ~

It ended out of court in September 2004. Most of the terms were sealed and some of them got out anyway. There was a monetary component, and Microsoft handed back the shares it had bought three years earlier. The condition worth keeping is the last one: every Z100 that had been manufactured was to be destroyed. The phone the entire fight had been about was written out of existence by the agreement that ended the fight.

~ the actual end ~

The lawsuit is not what killed Sendo. The company moved to Symbian and shipped the Sendo X, a Series 60 smartphone that arrived late and drew reviews that liked the hardware without forgiving the delay. Budget handsets kept going out to operators through 2004. What could not be recovered was the year spent waiting on somebody else's platform, and in a market where Nokia was putting out a new range every few months, a lost year is not a thing you make up later.

Administration came on 29 June 2005. Motorola was there the same day with an offer for the pieces it wanted, which was the research and development team of roughly two hundred engineers, nearly a hundred and seventy of them in Birmingham and the rest in Singapore, along with the patent portfolio. Fifty patents were granted and forty more were waiting. The brand was not in the deal, so the brand simply stopped.

~ the next chapter ~

The engineers carried on making phones with a different badge on the front. The patents went into Motorola's pile, and from there into the pile Google bought in 2012 before selling most of the hardware business to Lenovo. Sendo's administrators sued Orange in June 2006 over the SPV, which was the last time the name turned up in a headline.

What is left is a warning that keeps applying. A small hardware company let a very large software partner take equity and a board seat while that partner was building the platform every one of its competitors would also ship. Everybody who makes phones has had to think about that arrangement since, usually while signing a version of it.

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