i-mate SP3i mobile phone

Meet the C500's prettier twin sister

The C500 - so good they made it twice. Well, sort of. This phone is made by the same company as Orange's little gem of a smart phone, but with a few distinct, though mostly cosmetic, differences. It's just as small (108 x 45 x 18mm, equalling the record as the smallest smart phone available in the UK), it has the same sharp 64,000-colour screen, VGA camera and 200MHz processor - nippy enough for a smarty, if lagging a bit behind the fancier PDAs. It's tri-band, with infrared, Bluetooth and USB connectivity. In fact, besides looking a little sleeker, the most noticeable difference is the button joystick, which is much better for navigating than the C500's spongy rocker. It's better for gaming too, and will enable you to make more use of those downloadable Java nuggets. The keypad buttons, meanwhile, are ridged and a little bit easier to find with your thumb.

It uses the latest edition of Windows Mobile 2003 which offers all those tasty applications such as Pocket Outlook, Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger, but scrolling through the menus is still a bit of a pain and many crucial settings are hard to find.

If you want an Orange contract, you might as well get yourself a C500 - it'll probably be cheaper, and it should come with its own mini-SD card, not supplied with the SP3i - but for the rest of us, this neat smart phone should reach the wide audience it deserves.