Samsung's SGH-F210 updates an earlier model with a similarly cooky approach to combining mobile phone and music player, the X830. This is an altogether better attempt at the idea, but it is still fundamentally flawed.

On the plus side this mobile phone is tiny and lightweight. Its 72g is pretty much negligible in a pocket, while its 87.7 x 31mm are far too tiny to suggest that this is a mobile phone. The 20.5mm of thickness is a bit of a shock when stood against those other dimensions, but there is a reason.

This phone is all screen and round navigation pad on the front. To get to its numberpad you swivel the top section round. The need for two phone sections means that this phone is necessarily quite thick.

For all its small size the numberpad is nice and large, as are the shortcut buttons (Call, End, two soft-menus, Clear and Camera) which sit above it. No problems there and a real improvement on the bizarre two-buttons-per-row arrangement that the older X830 sported.

Get the latest Dell Coupons and other computer coupons at CheapStingyBargains.com.

In music player mode the F210 is pretty good. The navigation pad on the front of the phone does for left, right, up and down movement and, thanks to an outer ring you can rotate under a fingernail, for moving through menus too. The screen pops into wide mode when you are playing tunes, so that it looks like an ordinary music player.

There is 1GB of internal memory and you can use microSD cards to pump this up further. An FM radio adds to the musicality of this handset.

When in phone mode, though, or using any of the available extras, things start to fall apart, and this is mainly because of the screen. Samsung has designed a good main screen for the phone part of the F210, with clear information for missed calls, incoming texts and suchlike.

But the screen is simply too small to do a good job throughout. It measures 19mm wide and 33mm tall, and offers 128 x 220 pixels. There is a Web browser but the screen can't show enough information for it to be of any use at all. Framing photos you want to take with the 2-megapixel camera is difficult as the on-screen image is very small.

And choosing between menus is often hampered by the fact that you have to wait for options to scroll across the screen to see them in full. It is really annoying.

We wanted to like this phone for its small size and clever swivel. But in the end the screen lets it down too much. It's not quite the perfect blend of form and function that we had hoped for.