These days it's easy to get confused by the mobile phone market - there's a plethora of phone products so vast and varied that there's a mobile phone to suit literally every personality, pocket, wallet or, even, bikini line. The only product line more varied than the personal communications industry is that of the adult industry, where ladies have a veritable surfeit of choice when it comes to toys for pleasure with devices literally designed to fit every - and I mean every - nook and cranny, and maybe one or two gaps in between.

Should I go with the über-cool, latest Nokia - the N95 - kitted, as it is, with every feature known to man, including a powerful vibrating battery, or do I go for LG's Shine, a supremely sexy looking mobile phone built with LG's legendary (ahem) quality? There's the Nokia N93i, which looks like it's designed to either inflect extreme pain or extreme pleasure, or there's the somewhat unpronounceable Motorola KRZR K1, which is less motorbike and more fashion phone of choice for the elite.

"Why?" I hear you collectively cry. "Why have you gone for something that appears so unwieldy it will make your pocket look like the crotch of a 1970's porn star? Why have you gone for something so riddled with keys it's clearly trying to be a Blackberry and not quite making it? Why - oh why - have you gone for a brand that, two years ago, was fading in to the background as other smartphone manufacturers swept forth with the ease of Darth Vader slicing off Luke Skywalker's hand?"

As a phone, the Treo is probably a little bulky, but it's actually not as big in your pocket as pictures might suggest. At 154 grams it's 34 grams heavier than the sexy N95, but I don't criticise your wife for being overweight so let's not get into the semantics of how light your phone is compared to mine, ok? Phone functions are straight forward: you can ring people; people can ring you. You can send text messages; you can receive them too. Bluetooth and InfraRed technology allow you to communicate with other like-minded devices nearby. It has a camera, so you can multimedia message (if you really want to) and a built in version of Windows Media Player allows you to use your favourite annoying MP3 tracks as ringtones. If you really must.

Out on the road the combination of mobile phone and handheld device works even better. Using your mobile provider's data connection you can pick up, read and reply to your e-mails on the move without having to open your laptop or find a wireless network connection point. Unlike a Blackberry, which force feeds you your e-mail as soon as somebody sends a message on how to enlarge the size of your penis, the Palm only picks your mail up when you tell it to and I find this a lot less intrusive than Blackberry's method, not to mention a lot cheaper.

Being a Windows Mobile device you can download lots of add-on applications, ranging from productivity to entertainment software and anything in between and they install quickly and easily without too much prior knowledge or Microsoft Certified Engineer degrees being needed. The Windows Media Player communicates with the Media Player software on your desktop and you can simply drag and drop the tunes of your choice to install them on your device. The speaker isn't the best, when it comes to MP3 quality, but then this isn't really designed to be an MP3 player. A decent set of headphones plugged in to the standard mini-jack connector, mind you, quickly resolves that problem and it's not too bad as a portable music player. As on your computer, you can choose the tracks by artist, album, track, genre, rating etc. and the corroboration between handheld device and full computer even means that album covers are transported across too.

The other negative to this device is the camera. It's only a 1.3 megapixel lens with 2x digital zoom. It does focus automatically and it counters for white balance and it can even record video with sound. It's just not very good quality. All things considered, though, you don't really buy this type of device for the camera and I've never seen why I should have a camera on my mobile phone anyway. Even the stunningly good 3.2 megapixel camera on the Sony Ericsson K800i that I've just replaced isn't as good as my Pentax Optio S50 digital camera, so I rarely bothered using it. Palm would have been better keeping the camera out of the device, saving some weight and allowing application memory to be used elsewhere.