Sharp
903SH

The 903SH was a successful continuation of the first 9-series device, the Sharp 902SH. It featured the industry's first 3.2-megapixel auto-focus mobile camera with 2x optical zoom. It had "3D surround stereo side speakers" and a 2.4-inch LCD display. Being made in Japan, Sharp's approach to mobile devices differed significantly to that of Western rivals. It was a rather bulky phone but packed with high-quality features and was considered to be expensive and exotic when compared to the much smaller and more basic candy-bar phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. A further challenge for Sharp (and Vodafone) was that European 3G networks were still in their infancy with sparse coverage, mainly concentrated around major cities. This made it a tough sell at the time. Information courtesy of Christian Legere, the author of The Flipside Story