MWg is a relatively new arrival to the mobile phone market in the UK. And it's a made a bit of a splash – launching not one, or two, but three new handsets in its first few months on these shores. If the MWg Atom V is anything to go by, however, the firm is going to have its work cut out keeping up with the likes of HTC.

At first glance, it looks as if MWg has done a good job with its latest handset, the Atom V (identified by Windows Vista, interestingly, as a Giga-Byte Swan) is a pretty slick-looking phone. Its glossy black frontage and angular lines lend it more than an echo of LG's stylish Prada phone, and its 2.8in touch-screen sits flush with the rest of the fascia.

MWg's cryptic logo sits below the screen, flanked by some smart, silver pinstriping, and occupying the handset's lower third is a rather unusual and exotic-looking collection of buttons.

At its centre is a familiar five-way control pad, trimmed in chrome-effect plastic. Surrounding it are two skinny silver pick-up and hang-up buttons for phone calls, a pair of similarly thin soft buttons at the top, and the usual Windows Start and OK shortcut keys down below. It's a striking look and there's more good design elsewhere. The rear of the MWg Atom V is finished in a midnight blue, soft-touch plastic, while the edges are wrapped in a more sedate, but still fetching, silver.

It's disappointing then, after all the work that has clearly gone into the Atom V's luxurious looks, that this opulence isn't reflected in the device's build quality. It feels just a little light and plasticky all round, and although those skinny buttons are surprisingly easy to use, the five-way pad doesn't have the same quality feel. The stubby stylus feels cheap too – it's short, light and made from plastic rather than metal.

The screen is also a big disappointment. It's all too easy to scratch and once you switch it on and start to use the phone in earnest, not of particularly impressive quality either. The fact that it sits flush with the fascia does make it easier to grab and manipulate Windows Mobile's fiddly scroll bars and close applications – the close button that sit in the top right of the screen is much harder to tap with a finger when it’s surrounded by a couple of millimetres of screen bezel. The hard plastic coating gives the screen a grainy look though, which can make reading small text on the 240 x 320 screen an eye-straining job.

All that blank space around the buttons and screen looks good, but it doesn't help the Atom's pocketability. Try to slip this phone into a tight jeans pocket and you're likely to do yourself an injury -- it's quite slim at 14.5mm, but its other 59mm x 116mm measurements mean its definitely more at home in a bag or briefcase than stashed about your person.

If the design and build quality are mixed, so is the rest of the MWg Atom V’s specification. It has a pretty impressive list of hardware specifications: the processor, for example, is a 520MHz PXA270, but it's backed up with just 64MB of RAM. That means it's nippy, but the phone gets into trouble more quickly than others when Windows Mobile starts to stack up the applications with reckless abandon.

The MWg Atom V does have fast data capability and all the wireless connections you could want, but this does have a negative impact on battery life. In little over a day of relatively light use, this handset gave up the ghost and needed a recharge.

On the plus side, there's a SiRFStar III GPS receiver alongside the powerful processor, so you can use the phone as your in-car sat-nav with the right software. There's also a built-in FM radio and a camera at the rear with a light to help in dim conditions. But the camera is only 2 megapixels and produces barely passable, poorly-exposed and focused shots. There's no accompanying front-facing camera for video calls, though that’s hardly a great loss.

As Windows Mobile has matured, so the amount of quality third-party software has increased and we've come to expect high-end handsets to come bundled with a fair selection of pres-installed software. In the case of the MWg Atom V, there's a fair bundle of extras, the most useful of which is a quick-launch menu, launched with a long press of the Windows Start key. This provides fast access to useful functions such as phone profiles (something sorely lacking from standard-issue Windows Mobile), screen brightness and rotation, plus basic task manager operations like ‘Close All Programs’ and ‘Hide Program’.

There’s also a simple GPS tracking application and MWg has also seen fit to include Remote Desktop, plus an application that also allows you to control the phone from a PC. Other utilities include a pretty awful photo editing application and a tool that allows you to use the camera light as a torch. In the camera application, interestingly, there's also the option to use turn on the GPS facility and geotag your photos as you snap away.

But what Windows Mobile smartphones like the MWg Atom V need most isn't quirky utilities you'll play with once and never use again, it's useful additions like an improved on-screen keyboard, a Today screen plug-in that allows you to launch common applications or access contacts with your finger, or some other nod towards finger-friendliness – much like such as HTC's TouchFLO, for example. None of these are anywhere to be seen on the Atom V.

And that sums up this MWg handset – while it does well in some respects, it's not so good in others. It's undeniably good-looking – much more so than the HP iPaq 614c we recently reviewed – but it lacks the build and screen quality to go with it. It has all the communications features you could possibly need, including GPS and a quick processor, but battery life is poor and the system memory meagre. And while there's an interesting selection of software extras, there’s nothing that could be described as genuinely useful.

At £400 unlocked, the MWg Atom V is fair value (it’s almost £100 cheaper than a TyTN II) and worth considering if you’re looking for a touch-screen-only device, but there isn’t much else to distinguish it from the Windows Mobile crowd.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

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