If you want a Windows Mobile Smartphone you've been pretty much tied to candybar-style handsets up until now. Samsung changes that, having introduced the SGH-i320, a Windows Mobile Smartphone with a small keyboard and a wide format screen. Neither feature is exactly a revolution for a Smartphone, but they are for this particular operating system.

Because of its screen and keyboard the SGH-i320 is as tall and wide as a Pocket PC (111mm tall and 59mm wide), resembling those more sophisticated handhelds rather than an ordinary mobile phone. But it is also light at just 95g, and extremely thin at 11.5mm. It certainly looks stylish enough, and unless your hands are especially small it should feel OK to hold for viewing the screen and when locked to your ear during voice calls.

Samsung provides two batteries with the SGH-i320, and the second cell has its own charging unit which means it is easy to keep it topped up and ready to pop into your bag if you are going away for a day or so. During testing we found one cell enough for a couple of days' use if we weren't too keen on music playback.

Windows Mobile Smartphone comes with an array of its own software for things like diary management, e-mail and Web browsing. To this Samsung adds extras like a WAP browser, the Picsel viewer for Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents, unit conversion, a stopwatch and voice control. Many of these extras are designed to enhance the handset's appeal to 'serious' or business users.

The headphones, mains power and PC synch cable all use proprietary connectors, and their slots, on the right-hand edge of the handset, are protected by small flip-up covers that some people might find a little fiddly.

There is a 1.3-megapixel camera with a tiny flash sitting on the back of the casing. We've seen a lot better in Smartphones, but if all you want are short-life snaps then it should be fine.

With 120MB of shared memory built in, and the ability to add more via microSD cards, you should be able to store pictures and video footage on a card, as well as a selection of tunes to listen to through the Windows Media Player. But it is very irritating that you have to power down the SGH-i320 to get to the memory card slot which, though not actually under the battery, isn't accessible with the battery in place.

The SGH-i320 shows that you can reinvent the wheel and come up with something different. The extra software, the wide format screen, the keyboard and the spare battery all add to the standard Windows Mobile device format. It's expensive without an operator subsidy, though.