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The phone is a slider and it is a bit chunky in the hand and pocket. Indeed, it rivals my HTC TyTN II for size. For the record, it is 106.5mm tall, 53.9mm wide, 17.2mm thick and 136g. It grows to about 147mm when the slide is opened. The slide mechanism is smooth, but if you’ve smaller hands you might find, as I did, that the phone is a bit unwieldy for one-handed use.

The slide hides a very usable flat numberpad, clear key and two programmable shortcut keys. Presets are present to link you into the music player and RealPlayer.

With the slide closed, two softmenu keys and Call and End keys are supplemented by a pair of keys, one of which takes you to the handset menu and the other to the S60 Gallery where you can view images and video clips, get to streaming links and drop into the music player.

With the slide closed or opened the D-pad can be used in the usual way or swept with a fingertip for fast scrolling. It is quite an effective system once you get used to it, and particularly good for Web browsing.

I’ve mentioned music now. The player is competent and there is a 3.5mm headset jack on the left edge of the phone. I’d have preferred it to be on the top, but at least it is 3.5mm. As a fan of classical music, I’m really happy that the Composer tag is supported. An FM radio caters for those times when your own music doesn’t meet your needs.

This not being a final handset I didn’t think it fair to do a full battery rundown test on music playback. Samsung reckons you’ll get 8.5 hours of GSM talk, 310 on standby, which is an amazing claim for a mobile. I must have spent half an hour on the Wi-Fi and a couple of hours listening to music and got to the end of a full day with plenty of juice remaining. This phone should easily see you through a day between charges unless you are really heavy on it.

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