BenQ-Siemens E61 mobile phone

A music mobile guaranteed to make you turn off rather than tune in.

This will be priced at a rock-bottom £100 for pre-pay users, but once again, you get what you pay for.

One of the first phones that BenQ has produced since it snapped up Siemens' mobile division, this plastic wedge has a set of music buttons mounted at the top to give you quick access to your tunes.

There's a 512MB MiniSD card in the box which is enough to store around 120 songs. The handset also accepts cards up to 1GB in size. The built-in music player is pretty poor. The track library is little more than a basic file browser and, annoyingly, if you have a folder inside another folder, the tracks inside the second folder refuse to show up.

It also spits out the dummy when faced with songs encoded at a bit rate of 192kbps or higher (ie, the point at which MP3 sound quality generally becomes any good!) Nevertheless, helped by a five-band graphics equalizer, it makes a good fist of reproducing the strings on The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby via the headphones. Mind you, that's just as well, since there's no adaptor to let you use a different pair of 'phones.

The rest of the handset is very basic with crapulent pictures from the VGA camera and a low-res screen. The battery life isn't wonderful either - we got around two and half days out of it.

This is very cheap for a music phone. But as everything from the music player to the camera is so poor, we wouldn't exactly describe it as a bargain.