Sony Ericsson W880i

Not quite small enough to inhale, but the features and looks will still leave you breathless.

We’ve seen packets of gum larger than this phone. And those didn’t include push email, an MP3 player, music recognition software, Stereo Bluetooth, PC synchronisation, a 2 megapixel camera, a VGA camera and five-odd days of battery life.

At a mere 71 grams and with a striking design, it will attract gadgetry aficionados like a bull to a red flag, and when it does they’ll all comment that it feels like a battery with a phone hanging off it. And this is the only thing that’s really holding it back. It’s excellent in every way except for its cramped form factor.

The W880i is branded as a Walkman phone, which means it comes with Sony Ericsson’s music management software (first introduced on the W850i and which, in our opinion, is the best available on the market), a 1GB M2 memory card and the new, excellent TrackID feature. This records an audio clip, sends it to a database powered by Gracenote and returns the track title, artist name and album. It’s surprisingly accurate too, and worked four times out of five for us.

Using the keys feels you’re like tapping gingerly on the sawn off tips of a dozen flathead screwdrivers. It’s miniaturization for miniaturization's sake, and as you might have guessed, usability suffers. Even after you get accustomed to the microscopic buttons, the W880i’s more advanced functions (such as surfing the internet) can be a chore. Even something as simple as messaging can get tiresome; the second you start to get used to the button placement and start to get up to speed, your error rate will start to rise. It’s even more frustrating when inputting predictive text, as the menu hangs for a second before bringing up a list of possible matches for you to choose from.

The phone’s software compensates for this in some places. For instance, it vibrates for an instant whenever you roll over the icons in the main menu. The tabbed submenu layout -- common to most Sony Ericsson phones -- makes getting to options in the phone’s submenus beautifully simple, despite the W880i being only slightly larger than an iPod Nano.

Although the submenus are handled wonderfully, many of the main menu’s twelve options feel badly placed. The camera and Walkman options already have their own dedicated keys on the phone; the recent calls option is already assigned to a soft key and the TrackID and PlayNow options are simply glorified internet shortcuts to useful and semi-useful services respectively.

Other than these minor faults, it’s a brilliant phone. It will second guess you at exactly the right moments, letting you choose to save, discard or keep writing a message when you press the back button. When you do decide to send, you’ll get to choose from entering a phone number, looking up a contact, or selecting from a list of your most recently used contacts.

There’s a five way rocker switch in the place of a joystick that will bring joy to those who had their old joystick-driven Sony Ericsson gum up and break on them, but still love the interface. The included wired handsfree kit ends in a 3.5mm jack, so if you want to upgrade from the included (and rather good) rubber-flanged ear buds you can with no fuss.

If you work from a list of contacts, call people far more often than sending them messages and want a phone that’s stylish and highly capable; then we’re glad to have introduced you to your new favourite electronic device.