Looking around at the current crop of mobile phones, you can't fail to notice how high music playback is on the agenda. Sound quality is getting really good, and with dedicated music buttons and plentiful storage either internally or on memory cards, the 'phone as music device' concept is getting pretty well established.

LG's U400 adds a new, er, twist to the idea. If you've ever fancied being a DJ in a nightclub and scratching away to your heart's content, you can get some practice in here. There is a special music playback application on board which works in conjunction with a silver wheel located on the front of the handset to let you scratch your favourite tunes. I kid you not.

The wheel has many functions, actually. You can also use it to navigate around within applications and can press its sides up, down, left and right as you would a normal navigation button. There is an 'OK' button in its centre and it has a blue surround that itself contains three buttons.

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One is marked Menu and takes you - naturally enough - to the handset's menu, while the other two map to the soft-menus. They are a long way from the left and right bottom edges of the screen, where you'd usually expect to find soft-menu keys, and I found they took a bit of getting used to.

But then this handset is somewhat different from the norm, as that twisty wheel means the whole front design is unique. The handset is a slider, so the numberpad is hidden away, and it is small (99.8mm tall, 48mm wide and 20.4mm deep) and weighs just 114g. Much of its casing is shiny black, i.e. it looks nice, but you do need to keep wiping finger marks off.

The U400 is exclusive to Three as I write, and a dedicated button launches Three's music portal. Pushing the top of the wheel drops you into Three's Mobile TV menu.

A 2.0-megapixel camera is built in and its lens sits on the back of the casing. A front facing lens can be used for 3G video calls. As well as scratching you can compose tunes as ringtones or just to play for fun. Your own ripped tunes can also be played, of course, and the 68MB of internal memory is augmented by a 512MB microSD card.

LG's headset includes a good music control system and a 3.5mm jack so you can use your own headphones. You can also send stereo to a Bluetooth headset if you have such a thing.

Other goodies include a calendar and the PC sync software and cable needed to get it to talk to Outlook, plus e-mail, voice recording, currency and unit conversion, alarm clock and memo taking.

This is a neat little handset, visually appealing and suitable for small pockets. The scratching feature may not appeal to everyone, but a lot of attention has gone into the music playback features and generally this is a good little performer.