The images in the gallery don't do the phone justice really but we will try and describe the look of the device to you. Weighing 112g and measuring 16mm x 42mm x 103mm the exterior is coated in a stylish green with black rubberised outer coating, making it durable and easy to grip.

When you turn on the device it emanates the same black and green effect by producing vibrant colours from the fairly large 2.2" 240 x 320 res display and the combination of the screen and exterior quality makes it a device to show off to your friends.

As with the previous Z3 model the Z8 has a flip-up mechanism, with a joypad and phone buttons at the top part of the screen and the keypad at the base, in order to open up the phone you get a small piece of rubber to help, but on the new Z8 instead of moving upwards it curves to match the contours of your head.

It certainly is easy to move the display upwards but moving it back down takes a bit of getting used to and the screen will get lots of messy finger prints on it quite quickly, also we feel the piece of rubber will get damaged in no time, as some will struggle at first to close the device (the trick lies with bending the screen back slightly before closing it).

For texting and general navigation the device starts to struggle, primarily because its keys are pretty hard to press and the bottom set of keys are restricted by the slight rise produced by the speaker.

The small joypad was also difficult to use and we ended up selecting the wrong menu options because of how close the top buttons were placed to each other. In fairness it will be something you get used to and it took us around three days before we could truly feel comfortable with the device.

It does have some redeeming features to aid its design, for a start the ports for your expansion cards and USB are located to the sides of the phone and the sim card can be installed without removing the battery at the back, but as you can see from the image in the gallery the back of the phone is littered with finger prints, this is because the back part of the phone is quite hard to open at first - but will get easier the more you add/remove the sim.

You do get a nice presented box for your money, inside you will find the Bourne Identity film (to match the phones promotional theme), a 512mb microSD card (expandable to 4GB), plus as well as a normal pair of headphones you get a pair of Motorola wireless Bluetooth A2DP headphones thrown in and though these look a tad uncomfortable to wear, they were far from it and produced really good sound quality when listening to music or watching videos.

Delving into the interface reveals a much more user friendly approach than their older Z3 style, this is down primarily to the Symbian UIQ 3.1 operating system ( soft-key variant, no touch screen) which not only helps the performance of the Z8 but also opens the device up to a wide range of 3rd party applications, one of which we took advantage of straight away which was Documents To Go (allows you to use office documents), this is not included as standard but is free from their site www.dataviz.com until the end of this month, so if you are going for this phone, download this now.

Other applications consist of music, video, image viewers, Opera web browser and PIM applications such as calendar and notes, but Motorola has even thrown in a Sky Anytime program so for those who have a Sky subscription and set-top-box you can get content sent to your mobile.

With 90MB internal memory - which there is around 70MB free for your own storage - and a 512MB supplied microSD card, you won’t have any probs with space and there is plenty left over once all the apps have been taken into account, to add your favourite music/videos.

There are two cameras, one on the front for video calls and one on the back, this gives the game away that the device features 3G, which it does (more on this later) its 2MP back camera even has a flash mode attached making it ideal for night shots and we have attached one of the outdoor images we took to our gallery, which shows that the quality was not bad (note image reduced to 500px wide and saved in hi-quality setting).

Performance we have to say was top notch, videos, music and applications were quick to load and ran fine, the videos can even play back at 30fps making it extremely useful and could not be faulted, the only niggle was the supplied PC software (which is a vast improvement over their old software) as transferring files using the Desktop file manger was quite slow (we advise using 'My Computer' to transfer content to your storage card).

It lacks wi-fi but does have push email and 3G as mentioned earlier, however it does give you HSDPA support making it useful for mobile browsing at broadband style speeds.

Battery performance was average but it does have aggressive Power saving modes to give you extended life (which works by turning the display off every few seconds).

It’s a move in the right direction for Motorola but it’s not the most functional of devices and the £375 price tag - if bought sim-free - is a lot to ask for what is on offer.