Cable & Wireless CWD8500

Cheap 'n' cheerful chatterbox, and it's loaded with features

Hot on the heels of BT's colour-screen Calypso 1100 DECT phone (T3 102, 4/5) comes this model from Cable & Wireless. It's much cheaper than BT's impressive offering, but the colour screen isn't quite as good as its rival's and there's no built-in mobile SIM card-reader for transferring contacts into its memory. Nevertheless, the black-and-silver colour scheme looks pretty dapper, and the handset is very easy to use thanks to its intuitive Nokia-style menu system. It's also packed full of useful features - for example, it enables you to assign different polyphonic ringtones to different numbers in the phone book. All in all, this is a really tempting home phone.