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Four, five, six and seven: four tiny elongated buttons beneath the screen. Two map to the Windows Mobile Smartphone softmenus, one takes you to the Today screen and one is a back button. Between them these buttons provide much of the required device control.

Of course, there is a camera built into the Xda IQ. Its 1.3 megapixels feel decidedly small in number, it lacks a flash, and you aren’t going to be able to use it for anything much more than snaps to keep on the phone or share over the air. But again the control system is fairly neat. A button on the upper right edge starts the camera rolling, and the front buttons are your way into the digital zoom (which you should clearly never use – ed.) to a maximum of 8x at the lowest (160 x 120 pixel) resolution and the various, predicable, image filters such as daylight, night, greyscale, sepia and cool. You can adjust brightness, saturation, hue and gamma manually if necessary.

The left edge has the volume rocker and holding down the bottom part of this starts the voice dialling software. Note, though, that you have to create voice tags before you can use them. This edge also has a button for controlling all aspects of wireless communication in a feature Windows Mobile 5.0 calls Comm Manager. Press it and you can, for example, turn Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on and off, mute the ringer, set vibrate mode on and off and turn the SIM off completely.

Synchronisation and battery charging come courtesy of a mini USB cable which is just the kind of standardisation I like. But the headphones connector is a 2.5mm type when I prefer 3.5mm, and is located on the bottom edge of the casing when it should, for best ergonomics, be on the top.

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