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Menu items are organised into groups: Communicate, Entertainment, Utilities and Settings. You can move them around between groups by dragging them. So if you really want to take the New Email option out of the Communicate Group and shove it in the Entertainment group instead, you just drag it from the array on screen to the side-docked Entertainment tab.

The main screen can be populated with ‘widgets'. Tap a W on the idle screen and a menu bar appears along the bottom of the screen to and from which you drag items. Widget are both local and online. Widgets on the phone at launch provide the time, a calendar, world clock, notes, a photo, shortcuts to the handset's radio, and music control, important contacts, and an online widget that'll get you a weather forecast.

All round I have to say that the touchscreen is superb. It's intuitive to use, well thought through, and I found it extremely easy to get around. I'd go as far as to say this is the best touch interface I've seen on a handset.

The camera is brimming with features. There is autofocus, macro mode, a Xenon flash and the ISO stretches from 100 to 1600. There is a mechanical lens cover but here's no optical zoom, although you can go digital up to 16x. You can also geotag images.

Importantly, the controls are easy to use. You tap the screen to toggle a whole range of icons on and off, and then use them as you see fit. When you don't want the icons any more a screen tap shuts them down and the whole screen acts as your viewfinder.

There are some neat things I've never seen before. You can click the shutter using a button on the earphone cable. This can help with taking shake-free photos when you are holding the camera above your head. Even better in my view, you can tap a point on the screen and that becomes the focal point. When you take your finger away, the photo is taken.

There are various shot types. Beauty shot seems to lighten up faces in photos to make them seem sharper. Art shot alters colours to give you warmer or colder shots. Continuous shooting gives you seven rapid-fire photos. There is also face detection, blink detection and smile detection.

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