To miss-quote a popular advertising phrase, �the future's not bright.� Since Sendo are in administration and Motorola have bought the R&D department, plus the intellectual property portfolio which Sendo held, there's not much hope of any more official releases being made by Sendo. That being said, it's well known (by some) that there are still things "out there" which Sendo planned on making available to us, the lowly users of their phones. 

Probably the most sought after thing is Sendo's Theme Editor. While this has never been shown to a wide public audience, some people (myself included) have seen it being used, so why was it never released? - The reasons for this are plentiful, and only a few of them have been *revealed*.

First off, the version I saw was not finished; it still had a few bugs within it's software, and hadn't had the "polish" you'd expect to be added in the final stages of an applications' development. Another major problem (of Sendo's own making), was that they kept changing the theming engine on the X and X2. Each time they did this, it meant altering the Theme Editor to bring it back inline with the latest firmwares. It also meant that Sendo couldn't release the Theme Editor until the theming engine was fixed. (something which was rumoured for the next firmware release) The last big hurdle for the Theme Editor was it's market position - did Sendo want to release this important branding tool to the general public, or did they want to only allow network operators to have access to it? (for example, Vodafone had an exclusive "Live" theme and branding on the Sendo X phones which they sold.

Firmware updates have been a subject of conversation ever since the Sendo X phone was released. (in some circles, before it was released) Sendo's decision to make the phones user-upgradeable was one of the X's great selling points, but it was also a victim of it's own success - it meant the users were far more vocal than they otherwise might have been to get bugs fixed, and were far more impatient to get their hands on the latest and greatest firmware releases.

Sendo released three main firmware updates to the X (some other versions shipped on particular phones) - these were released in September 2004 (version 1.56.5.2); November 2004 (version 1.98.5.2) and June 2005 (version 1.198.8.2). The delays in getting the last two versions released caused a lot of pain for Sendo, mostly because some impatient users started to become very vocal about what they saw as Sendo failing their users. In fact, Sendo was working very hard to get the firmwares as stable as possible; especially with the upcoming release of the X2 phone, stability was Sendo's number one priority.  

The last item to be covered is the much talked about Sendo SDK. (software development kit)  This was an oft promised set of tools, which would allow other companies and developers to write applications which could take advantage of the changes which Sendo had made to Nokia's stock Series 60 implementation, and more importantly, applications which could hook into the excellent Now! screen. Rumour had it that Sendo did release the SDK, but had to pull it from their website after it became evident that they'd inadvertently allowed access to some protected Nokia IP. Unfortunately however, an updated version was never made available, and with the demise of X2 probably won't be.

There is one faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel though - IF Motorola allow the Sendo guys to port Now! to UIQ, or if Motorola buy a Series 60 license (the latter being very unlikely), then maybe the SDK will make a re-appearance in some other guise - this time branded as Motorola, but with Sendo DNA.

Having started with a miss-quote of an advert, it�s only fitting to end with a miss-quote of a film � �who knows what the future holds?�