There's an element of me that really wants you to like this mobile phone. I want to tell you how great it is, how easy it is to use, how the features are exceptional and how strong the reception is. I want you to know it's as good a phone for beginners as it is hard-core mobile users from the days of the Yuppie, and I want to tell you all this because it really looks like it should be a great phone.

There are three types of mobile phone: Nokia, who make fashionable phones for the teenage market and those that need something that is dead easy to use; Motorola, who make sexy looking phones for the trendy urban adult; and Sony Ericsson, who make phones for the business person. The de facto rule is that you should not stray from this ideology. If you're a teenage text freak the Nokia is perfect; if you're an up-and-coming banker wanting to look the biz in the trendy London wine bar, buy Motorola; if you're an international company representative looking for something full of business applications, go with the Sony Ericsson. You won't be disappointed.

God it's good looking, in a way that reminds you of the super-successful Apple iPod. It looks simply stunning when you put it down on the bar next to your colleagues. The shiny silver edging and back reflect the lighting, the fascia is a simple white (like the iPod), the screen is a good size and extremely bright and clear to read, and the buttons are large and easy to push, even with the clumsiest of thumbs. In the dark, the buttons glow a neon blue making them large and easy to read, which might be slightly annoying to the person sitting next to you in the cinema but great if you forgot to take a torch with you.

It has a camera and, well ... actually, that's about it. It has a camera. And not a very good one at that, to be honest. There's no light, which on a modern phone is unusual, and the resolution is ridiculously poor - this camera daren't boast as it only has a 300k resolution.

So far, then, it's not a very good phone despite the good looks. Admittedly O2 class it as their entry-level i-Mode phone but by today's standards, and compared to just about everything else on the market, it's incredibly lacking. How, then, does it stack up as a mobile phone?

Despite my best attempts, you can't just scroll down page-by-page to find who you want. You either have to scroll through each contact individually or attempt to type in their name and hope that the software will bring them forward. Find their name and hit the green call button and hold the phone to your ear... and wait... and wait... and wait. Thinking the signal might have dropped you glance at the screen to see the phone is waiting for you to confirm that this is the number you want to ring.

What about the rest of the functions, then? Well there's a calculator, and a clock, and a countdown timer all in the menu somewhere, and there's the option for playing Java games that you download from your i-Mode account. Of course, there's no option for you to download and keep on your phone for playtime whenever - instead, you download and play on your phone, paying a fee to the i-Mode account each time you wish to enjoy yourself, or paying up front for, say, thirty plays of that game before you need to pay again.