On first impression the Tri-Band Graphite is certainly dressed in its business suite, with a series of dull dark and light grey colours housing a crystal clear hi-res display (240 x 320). You also get a mobile style keypad, front and back camera for making 3G video calls and taking pictures/videos and a selection of small buttons - plus a joypad - for navigation.

At the base of the Graphite you have a USB interface for connecting your mains/USB cable and a small 2.5” socket for the supplied headphones/handsfree kit.

Its weight will certainly be appreciated for those who like to carry light, as it weighs only 105g.

As with most mobiles you have to press a key several times in order to enter text and we did feel that each key press was a tad heavy. The biggest bind however lies with the option keys that are placed directly above the joypad, these are used to access options that appear directly above each key. Due to them being positioned so close together you will find that when it comes to selecting a menu option, nine times out of ten (in the first few days) you will pick the wrong one.

If this was not enough the joypad itself takes a while to master, in the beginning its too clumsy and we found it was far too easy to shoot past icons that we wanted to press.

The OS used by the Graphite is Windows Mobile 5 smartphone edition and though it lacks the quality of its larger Pocket PC brothers it gives you a reasonable set of utilities and software. The best being the connectivity manger for controlling your Bluetooth and Wifi options There’s also the standard Windows Mobile media player, notepad and Internet Explorer web browser. Plus a basic PDF and Office document viewers is also thrown in.

From a technical point of view the Graphite ticks all the right boxes, with an Intel 416mhz CPU powering the device you will find it copes well at anything you can throw at it.

Memory wise you get 128Rom and 64Mb Ram with around 45mb free for storage. Expansion is taken care of in the form of microSD cards.

Moving on with the conenctivity list you have push email support, 3G video calls, USB host, VPN connectivity, 3G (UMTS) , Bluetooth 2 and 802.11 b/g Wifi.

During our tests we found it easy to connect to our wireless router and adding Bluetooth devices were a doddle, we were also able to link the Graphite to a pair of A2DP Bluetooth headphones.

The camera quality was not too bad, we have added a small sample to our image gallery as an example, as you can tell its a close up piccie which tended not to focus that well but it was shot in low light and colour depth was good. It does come with a handy flash function so you can take images in lower light conditions and video calls also looked as good as you can expect from 3G performance.

During voice calls we found that we could hear the person on the other end pretty well but they said they had difficulty hearing us at times, with our voices sounding a bit low - this could be down to phone reception.

When it came to web browsing pages its 3G support does help, mobile designed sites displayed fine on the small screen, but when it came to viewing full sites you will find it harder to browse and to download content, thankfully there a few ways to squash the site to fit the screen but again the joypad made it more difficult to navigate.

The Lithium ION 1100mAh battery has a claimed life of up to 4hours talk time and 150 hours standby time which is pretty good for a device with this spec.