Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

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The square four-way control pad is similarly fiddly, but at least you don’t have to use it – the centre button doubles as an optical touch-pad, much like that on the Samsung Omnia SGH-i900. There’s no on-screen mouse pointer option and while it takes lots of finger swipes to move the selection highlight around, it works well enough for most purposes.

With an 800 x 480 resolution, the Xperia X1’s touch-sensitive screen ought to be its crowning feature and it is wonderfully crisp and bright. Unfortunately, it’s only three inches from corner to corner and so while text is pin-sharp, it’s tiny. This is a huge missed opportunity – the HTC Touch HD has the same resolution, but its screen has a much more comfortable 3.8in diagonal.

For some silly reason, Sony Ericsson has also left a lip of aluminium around the Xperia X1’s screen, which gets in the way when prodding the corners with a finger. You could just fish out the stylus, but a flush-fitting screen (like on just about every other premium smartphone) would be a better option – and be far more in keeping with the X1’s otherwise slick design.

There’s a few minutes of please to had from sliding the screen open and closed – its curved track is a simple, but novel way to tilt the display towards you and it locks into place with a pleasant snap. Unfortunately, Sony Ericsson hasn’t put as much design effort in the Xperia X1’s keyboard and while the silver keys look great, they’re small, have a very low profile and are quite closely spaced. This makes typing something of a chore, particularly on the top row of letters, where your thumb tends to bash against the bottom edge of the screen.

Windows Mobile has long since lost its appeal since the iPhone showed how a mobile user interface should work, which is why handset manufacturers have been developing their own simpler, more stylish (usually) front-end software. After all, why go the all the effort of designing a super-stylish smartphone when the first thing you see is the dull Windows Mobile Today screen?

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