The phone not only has the looks but underneath the bonnet it packs a hefty amount of features.

From the outside it provides a small joypad and keys for navigating and typing text, these were surprisingly easy to use for their size. The phone also provides two cameras, one at the back for pictures/video and one at the front for video calls. To the left you get a shortcut button to its Walkman feature and to the right a volume control/info switch and a camera button, which we have to say was really awkward to press.

The strongest aspect of the phone lies with its connectivity options, it provides Bluetooth, Push email, Internet Sync, RSS reader and 3G support. The latter enables you to browse websites pretty quickly and do video calls, which worked a treat during our tests - as long as your recipient also has 3G that is.

Applications provided with the phone vary between utilities such as notepad and contacts to multimedia programs such as video and a music player(you also get the video and music DJ software found in other Sony Ericsson mobiles). You only get one game so don't expect much games playing out of the box.

The sound quality that was produced from the supplied headphones was great and was aided further by the graphic equaliser. Thankfully once again you can add your own 3.5" (interface)headphones if you wish or pair the phone with Bluetooth A2DP headphones.

The Sony comes with a basic 16mb of free internal memory but luckily its supplied with a 1GB M2 card to boost storage - so you should get plenty of music onto your phone.

The high-quality screen makes looking at videos a dream but we found our test video to play a bit sluggish when viewed in landscape mode, this we feel was down to the speed of the memory card because when we transferred the video to the internal memory it played fine.

Sony decided to drop the flash element for the 2MP camera which is a surprise, granted the quality of the images taken was fine but the camera is definitely the phones weakest link.

Battery performance is claimed to last 20hours when listening to music so you should get some longevity out of the Sony before it need re-charging, but when doing video calls or watching films this does have a large impact on the batteries life and will drain it quite quickly.

Phone conversations were clear and we felt the phone reception through our Orange Sim was pretty good.