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Size-wise this is a fairly tall phone. With both sliders closed it measures 103mm tall, 48.6mm wide and 17.2mm thick. With the main slide up to reveal the number pad it is about 135mm tall, while the ‘speaker slide’ takes it to about 113mm tall. It weighs 108g.

The black and silver livery won’t surprise anyone. The front-mounted softkey and Call and End keys are tall and thin which makes them easy to hit. But their icons are to the side rather than on the keys themselves, and in these days of touch phones I found myself hitting the white backlit icons rather than the buttons at times. D’oh!

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The large silver navigation key rotates under a fingertip as well as offering up, down, left and right clicks. In music playing mode, rotation takes you forwards and back through tracks, albeit excruciatingly slowly, and it acts as a scroller in other aspects of the phone.

The screen is a clear and bright 2.2-inch, 240 x 320 pixel, 262 thousand coloured TFT, which fared well indoors; less well outside. The number pad under the main slide is large and, as well as the 0-9 keys, has a delete key, application switcher shortcut and video call key.

The main camera sits on the back of the casing and has no cover. It shoots at a maximum of 3-megapixels and its features include autofocus and an LED flash. A side button takes you to the camera and shoots a photo.

The coloured dish, photographed under normal household lighting, is a little dark but passable. The chair is also somewhat dark, though its white is uniform, which is welcome. The flowers were photographed quite close in and without the benefit of a macro mode. Detailing is good and colour reproduction is pretty close to the real thing.

Other applications include an FM radio, RSS reader, Web browser, memo maker, task manager, voice recorder, world clock, calculator, unit converter, timer, stopwatch, mobile email, calendar and five alarms.

Verdict

There is no doubting that music quality is good, but it is not good enough to put all of the competition in the shade. The dual slide arrangement is clever but not a deal-maker. The 3.5mm headset socket is welcome, but every music phone should have one really. I think I’d still rather carry a separate music player on the grounds that it is likely to offer even better quality.

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